RightsCon Toronto 2018

The increasing amounts of data available to humanitarian and human rights workers has an immense potential to solve many existing problems in these sectors. However, the use of such data has the potential to pose equally concerning risks to the very beneficiaries of such activities. In situations of armed conflict and ongoing rights abuses, breaches of data stores can risk exposing already vulnerable people to increased surveillance, discrimination, or persecution by ill-intentioned third parties on the grounds of ethnicity, political affiliation, sexual orientation, religion, gender, etc. Data may be aggregated to create datasets used for malicious purposes by parties to a conflict.
In light of these risks, data protection must be at the heart of efforts towards increasing capacities to use and analyze data within the humanitarian and human rights sectors. This session will engage these sectors, as well as the wider technological community, in order to answer key questions around i) whether it is even possible do analytics with a humanitarian purpose while emphasizing data protection, ii) what the necessary competencies and knowledge are required to do so, and iii) how we can engage the humanitarian community in protecting people from these risks while building their data literacy.