ReliefWeb

KEY MESSAGES:

1. New information and communication technologies in humanitarian response create opportunities for improved humanitarian response as well as risks to the privacy and security of affected communities.

2. The current system tends to restrict sharing of relatively harmless data, while not sufficiently protecting information that could be used to identify individuals and communities.

3. The information that humanitarians can collect will be shaped in the future by factors that include:

a) privacy laws and any appropriate exceptions for disasters and crisis.

b) ethical considerations, such as the need for practices that ensure information is used responsibly, particularly when obtaining consent is not practical.

c) the extent to which political or criminal groups target humanitarian operations, as well as the level of government surveillance.

1. To respond to these emerging issues, humanitarian organizations should:

a) prioritize transparency and evidence based humanitarianism and ensure that scarce resources for data security are focused only on truly sensitive information.

b) support ethical innovation, ensuring that projects using new or untested systems are held to a higher standard of oversight, and codes of conduct are regularly updated and enforced.

c) adopt codes of conduct and operational procedures for the ethical and principled use of information, in particular personal data, at the organizational level, and consider adopting universal guidelines for the use of information in humanitarian crisis.

d) invest in risk analysis and information security, including ensuring basic data security training for staff, and where needed, affected communities, and working with experts to better understand, prevent and respond to attacks.

e) promote the idea of a “humanitarian cyberspace” that humanitarian information systems should be off-limits for attacks and advocate that in some cases cyber-attacks on humanitarian actors are violations of international humanitarian law.

f) advocate for the co-creation of legal frameworks with affected communities to protect their data in emergencies.