People go to work in tech because the want to solve problems and make money. And the wonderful thing about tech is that when it works well, it does both. In some cases, tech can truly save lives and make the world a better place, but often it does not. And having known many tech workers, I know that when tech fails, tech workers take it personally. But becoming an expert in tech means devoting your life to learning a huge body of specialized knowledge and not leaving a lot of time to learn about other things. This is what makes San Francisco and Silicon Valley seem like bubbles. They are bubbles full of geniuses who truly do not know that Burma and Myanmar are the same country.
As a result, a lot of tech is designed to meet the needs of wealth, educated white men who like coffee, video games and living in the Bay Area. For example, when the “average tech user” travels, they are usually travelling as a tourist or to attend a conference, so most tech products are designed for people who travel as tourists or who attend a lot of conferences. The sheer number of tech products for people who attend a lot of conferences is staggering. Often, these tech products work well for everyone else, but not always.
In the 1990s, researcher Ann Cavoukian developed the concept of “privacy by design,” meaning that data collection systems would implant privacy as the “default setting” for all data collection systems. She rightly recognized that privacy is a concern to everyone, everywhere and any new technology that implicated privacy would need to intimately concern itself with preserving privacy.
Increasingly, communications tech products like Facebook and Whatsapp have become critical for refugees, displaced and migrating individuals and others of “humanitarian concern.” In fact, in many cases, tech has become crucial to sharing vital information on routes, countries, laws, dangers, family plans and a host of other information that is critical for people on the move. Yet the needs of people on the move from a humanitarian crisis are rarely taking into account during the design process of mainstream tech. It’s time for this to change.
Displaced People Mostly Need to Use the Same Tech as Everyone Else
So far, tech for displaced people has mostly come in the form of startups who seem to view displaced people as a niche market. This is the result of an erroneous assumption on the part of the tech industry that “refugees, migrants, asylum seekers and others” are a static category of people that have nothing to do with mainstream users of most tech products. But nothing could be further than the truth. While having refugee-specific apps and products is a great idea for some things that are specific only to refugees, like an app that helps you prepare your asylum claim, for example, most existing tech could be easily designed to serve refugee needs because most of what refugees need is universal.
Increasingly, most refugee-specific tech is designed and implemented by aid agencies, meaning that refugees, asylum-seekers and displaced people risk finding themselves trapped inside a tech world purpose-built just for them, cut off from the wider information revolution.
What Would Happen if Aid Agencies Were Subject to Crowd-sourced Reviews Like Restaurants?
For example, let’s say you are a refugee living in a camp and you don’t like the local NGO that’s been hired to administer the pre-school in your zone. You’ve been complaining and complaining about it to your friends and family, to you local community liaison, to the local OxPlan office, but nobody seems to care. Your smart-phone has a new OxPlan app on it that’s supposed to help you navigate life in the camp, but it doesn’t have a place to lodge a complaint.
So one day, you google this NGO and there you see that they have over 300 one-star reviews, almost all by angry people living in various refugee camps around the country. You add your own one star review and so do all your friends and family. By the end of the week, the NGO has over 500 one star reviews, the most one-star reviews of any local aid agency around. It makes the local papers, “Local NGO paid to serve refugees has over 500 one-star reviews from refugees.” Finally, news reaches the head of country office for OxPlan and they open an investigation. “It’s funny,” the head of OxPlan says in an interview, “we’ve been working with that local implementing partner for years and never heard anything negative. But of course, as soon as we learned there might be problems, we responded right away.”
If you work in the tech industry and you have never been a refugee, it may have never occurred to you that product reviews could drive change in a refugee camp, but public shaming and unhappy feedback has the same power to effectuate change in a refugee camp that it does anywhere else. There’s no need for a specialized app from the aid agency to filter and sanitize the information that refugees get, and share.
How could Google work with refugees to make this sort of review system work? Should there be special functionality that could make reviews more private, more effective or easier to use for people who can’t read?
How Would Humanitarian-By-Design Work?
The biggest challenges for refugees, asylum-seekers and displaced persons in using tech are the same as for people everywhere, only more acute: privacy, accessibility, and, perhaps most importantly, accountability. Many refugees live in camps run by unaccountable aid agencies paid for by big donors whose primary goal is to keep people trapped in camps. Refugee data is becoming big business while refugees have little avenues to impacting data privacy laws or policies, which are usually set in donor countries to serve the needs of governments and, best-case scenarios, some citizens. Even if data protection rules like those set by the EU apply in refugee camps, through what mechanism could an ordinary person living in a camp enforce their privacy?
Private sector tech companies can and should join the front-line fight to make their products accessible and usable for refugees, asylum-seekers and displaced persons, in part by ensuring better privacy. Right now, the opposite is happening, as Big Tech companies like Palantir help unaccountable aid agencies develop specialized tools to collect refugee data, helping to obliterate what little privacy they have left. Palantir appears to be operating under the assumption that WFP is the end user and client, rather than focusing on the recipients of food aid, who are the real end-users. For example, Palatir software designers should be asking themselves if their products are being used to help make WFP more transparent to their customers, or less so? Meanwhile, specialized products risk segregating refugees, asylum-seekers and displaced persons into an information silo cut off from the rest of the interconnected world.
Tools that we all use, like Facebook, are often at their worst when used by refugees, stateless and displaced persons, and are never designed with these customers’ needs in mind. And the problem goes much deeper than the risk of abuse and lack of privacy. Facebook is great at helping an American’s little league team raise money for their new uniforms, but as Sabhanaz Rashid Diya writes in Wired, it is worse than useless when it comes to connecting individual donors in rich countries to people in need abroad. Despite all of our interconnection, if you live in the US and you want to help a refugee in a far-off camp, the best way to do so is still by donating to a large aid agency. Could Facebook put into place special protocols in humanitarian emergencies to streamline the transfer of aid and information?
Humanitarian-By-Design
Here are just a few ideas, but surely the smart people at Google and Facebook could think up a bunch more.
Create special protocols and functionality for humanitarian needs that can be easily and swiftly streamlined into the normal functionality of major tech products like Google, Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter, etc.
Hire humanitarian experts, including refugees, to advise designers on how to make tech work better for vulnerable people.
Create a voluntary, global certification process for tech products to be “humanitarian-by-design.”
