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“Do No Harm” in the Age of Big Data: Data, Ethics, and the Refugees

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Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios

Abstract

Leveraging call detail records for humanitarian analysis involves the collection and sharing of a large set of behavioral data, from hundreds of thousands of people. There is a risk that such data could be misused for surveillance and suppression, and there are strong criticisms that have been leveled at efforts involving call detail records. The D4R Challenge is not immune to these criticisms, and during the design and implementation of the challenge, these issues were discussed at length. This chapter outlines these issues and how they were (imperfectly) addressed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    As mentioned in Chap. 1, while Turkey is party to the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, it does not grant Syrian refugees the legal status of “refugee,” but considers them “temporarily protected foreign individuals”. This complicates the rights Syrian refugees have from a legal point of view, where they cannot benefit from the internationally established measures of protection. See Chap. 6 for definitions of the key terms.

  2. 2.

    www.palantir.com.

  3. 3.

    See Chap. 1 of this volume.

  4. 4.

    https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/data-protection-eu_en.

  5. 5.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/03/technology/yahoo-hack-3-billion-users.html.

  6. 6.

    https://www.ftc.gov/equifax-data-breach.

  7. 7.

    https://www.digitalglobe.com/ecosystem/open-data.

  8. 8.

    https://history.nih.gov/research/downloads/nuremberg.pdf.

  9. 9.

    https://www.wma.net/policies-post/wma-declaration-of-helsinki-ethical-principles-for-medical-research-involving-human-subjects/.

  10. 10.

    https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/.

  11. 11.

    https://www.dhs.gov/publication/menlo-report.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Patrick Vinck & Phuong N. Pham

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Albert Ali Salah

  3. Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Albert Ali Salah

Authors
  1. Patrick Vinck
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  2. Phuong N. Pham
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  3. Albert Ali Salah
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Albert Ali Salah .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Albert Ali Salah

  2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Alex Pentland

  3. Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy

    Bruno Lepri

  4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Emmanuel Letouzé

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Vinck, P., Pham, P.N., Salah, A.A. (2019). “Do No Harm” in the Age of Big Data: Data, Ethics, and the Refugees. In: Salah, A., Pentland, A., Lepri, B., Letouzé, E. (eds) Guide to Mobile Data Analytics in Refugee Scenarios. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12554-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12554-7_5

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-12553-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-12554-7

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