Digital progress can accelerate the achievement of each of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals in particular eradicating extreme poverty, promoting sustainable peace, agriculture, and decent work, reducing maternal and child mortality, facilitating access to public services, and achieving universal literacy. However, technology can also threaten privacy and security and have implications for human rights, states the United Nations.
Digital development comes with the promise that providing poor nations with digital products and services will reduce their poverty but this also comes at a great cost. Data is now the most valuable commodity in the world and the largest unexplored data source is the almost half of the world’s population who have no access to the internet. Development strategies connect people to digital services but also allow their data and privacy to be available to tech companies that are eager to monetize these.
“The contradiction at the heart of digital development is that initiatives that ostensibly aim to reduce poverty also enrich tech companies and enable them to generate profits from marginalized populations’ data,” wrote Kevin Klyman for TechCrunch.
Technology promoters can claim many successes but they cannot justify putting the preferences of multinational companies above those of local communities, continues Klyman. The bottom line is that digital services alone will not solve global poverty and more often lead to damage. If tech leaders really wanted to end global poverty, they could consider a more direct impact – the redistribution of less than half of their annual profits would provide the US$175 billion a year over 20 years that is needed to eradicate global poverty.
Digital financial services are growing because they generate fees and investment opportunities as well as valuable data about people’s consumption habits – information that is important for companies such as Microcredit. Investors from the United States and China have more than doubled their shares in digital financial services in Africa, accounting for 60% of total volume. Despite the predictions, there have been no indications that the increased investment in digital financial services will lead to poverty reduction. On the contrary, the financial services data that has been used to assess individuals’ creditworthiness has led to the economic exclusion of people in poverty by denying them access to credit. These exclusions have been proved to have been applied on the basis of poor algorithmic decision-making.
Today, digital technologies, such as data sharing and artificial intelligence, are used to track and diagnose problems in health, agriculture, and the environment or to perform daily tasks such as traffic navigation or bill payments. They can be used to defend and promote human rights but can also be used to violate them, for instance by monitoring our acquisitions, movements, behaviors, and even conversations. Governments and businesses have more and more tools to extract and exploit data for financial and other purposes.
However, personal data could become an asset to a person if there was better regulation of personal data ownership. Data-driven technological strategies have the potential to empower individuals, improve human well-being and promote universal rights. They can address challenges such as the two billion adults who still make cash transactions, the 35% of women globally excluded from the formal financial system, and the US$110 billion loss each year due to issues with government expenditures and tax collections globally.
Tech giants – the largest companies in the information technology industry of the United States – have constantly impeded efforts to enact more stringent data protection laws around the world. For instance, as Kenya negotiates a free trade agreement with the United States, Amazon and Google are lobbying for the American government to introduce measures to liberalize cross-border data flows which runs counter to the 2019 Kenya Data Protection Act. Such a law would allow the Big Tech to outcompete local businesses in the competition to analyze people’s financial data for new business opportunities. Despite attempts by Kenya to maintain its requirement for personal data to be stored locally, the Biden administration has suspended the trade deal until Kenya accepts Big Tech’s requirements.
“Given the different degrees of digital development in the United States and Kenya, data flows between the two economies are most likely to enable global digital platforms in the United States to access Kenyan data and harness them, while Kenyan companies may have more limited abilities to collect and monetize data generated in the United States,” UNCTAD analysts wrote in the Digital Economy Report 2021.
Without sufficient data protection and data minimization standards – meaning that a data controller should limit the collection of personal information to that which is directly relevant and necessary to accomplish a specified purpose – users of digital development programs are at risk. At the beginning of this year, the Red Cross revealed that its computer systems had been hacked and that the confidential information of 515,000 vulnerable people had been stolen.
On the other hand, advanced IT has the potential to scale misinformation and content curation beyond what has been possible historically in major conflicts. In January, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center detected destructive malware targeted at Ukraine-based organizations which was designed to delete data and programs. Microsoft committed to protect Ukraine from cyberattacks and from state-sponsored disinformation campaigns by closely monitoring events and making ongoing adjustments to strengthen detection and disruption mechanisms to avoid the spread of disinformation and to promote independent and reliable content in return.
“The past few days have seen kinetic warfare accompanied with a well-orchestrated ongoing battle in the information ecosystem where the ammunition is disinformation, undermining truth and sowing seeds of discord and distrust. This requires decisive efforts across the tech sector – both individually by companies and in partnership with others – as well as with governments, academia, and civil society,” declared Microsoft.
According to experts from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, without the significant leadership of the United States in the information technology industry, low- and middle-income countries might be forced to consider alternative digital models offered by China and other authoritarian providers. These models undermine civil liberties such as the right to privacy and freedom of expression; they also undermine the rule of law and allow for social oppression. Moreover, these models of digital infrastructure are often accompanied by unpleasant conditions that must be accepted as part of the offer which not only undermine countries’ sovereignty but also force them to adopt a development model that does not serve the strategic and security interests of the United States and its allies.
