Search
Content type: News & Analysis
Picture: CC: BY (Kirill Sharkovski)-SA
This article was written by Jamila Venturini from Derechos Digitales. The original version (in Spanish) is available here.
How implementing social protection programmes that condition access to basic services to state and private surveillance exacerbate the prevailing inequality on the continent.
While the gap between rich and poor is increasing in the world, Latin America remains the most unequal region of the world. According to the Economic…
Content type: News & Analysis
Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
In May, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston invited all interested governments, civil society organisations, academics, international organisations, activists, corporations and others, to provide written input for his thematic report on the human rights impacts, especially on those living in poverty, of the introduction of digital technologies in the implementation of national social protection…
Content type: Examples
After an 18-month investigation involving interviews with 160 life insurance companies, in January 2019 New York Financial Services, the state's top financial regulator, announced it would allow life insurers to use data from social media and other non-traditional sources to set premium rates for its customers. Insurers will be required to demonstrate that their use of the information doesn't unfairly discriminate against specific customers. New York is the first state to issue specific…
Content type: Examples
In February 2019, the World Food Programme, a United Nations aid agency, announced a five-year, $45 million partnership with the data analytics company Palantir. WFP, the world's largest humanitarian organisation focusing on hunger and food security, hoped that Palantir, better known for partnering with police and surveillance agencies, could help analyse large amounts of data to create new insights from the data WFP collects from the 90 million people in 80 countries to whom it distributes 3…
Content type: Examples
For low-income Americans to receive public benefits they are legally entitled to, they must submit to widespread monitoring of their intimate and personal affairs. This monitoring includes sharing a trove of personal documents and information, unannounced home visits from caseworkers, mandatory face-to-face meetings with caseworkers to review one’s grocery, hygiene, and parenting choices, electronic and physical surveillance, mandatory drug testing, and investigations by fraud control agents…
Content type: Examples
The New York City public benefits system has been criticized for its punitive design, how it too often disciplines, rather than helps, people who are legally entitled to benefits. According to Mariana Chilton, the public benefits system is designed to control, surveil, and penalize low-income people, and it is women of colour who disproportionately bear these burdens. Chilton highlights how the violent treatment of Jazmine Headley and her baby in a public assistance waiting room in December…
Content type: Examples
Private companies are not the only actors pushing for increased control of benefit claimants. The World Bank has also instrumental in funding programmes aiming at assisting government in administrating welfare programmes which has led to futher surveillance of benefits claimants, in December 2016 for instance, they approved a $75 million budget to fund the so-called Social Safety Nets Project in Sri Lanka. The aim is to create a “single registry of citizens containing information on family…
Content type: Examples
The State is not always the only actor involved in the surveillance of benefits claimants. Often those practices are encouraged, facilitated or conducted by private companies. South Africa for instance mandated MasterCard to help distribute benefits through biometric debit cards.
https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/23941/south-africa-enlists-mastercard-to-distribute-welfare-through-biometric-debit-cards
Publication: FinExtra
Content type: Examples
The surveillance of benefits claimants does not happen only online. In the UK, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) is known to be using CCTV footage of public buildings but also gyms and supermarkets to prove some benefits claimants are not actually disabled. Gym memberships are also being requested and an increasing number of private companies are being asked to send their footage for that reason.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/31/benefits-claimants-fear-…
Content type: Examples
In Israel, the National Insurance Institute – in charge of granting benefits – eventually dropped a tender that had caused outrage in the country after being uncovered by Haaretz and Channel 13. The tender revealed the NII was trying to collect online data about benefits claimants – including from social media – to detect cases of frauds. The tender used wheelchair users as an example, suggesting that finding pictures of alleged wheelchair users using bikes on social media could contribute to…
Content type: Examples
The rise of social media has also been a game changer in the tracking of benefits claimants. In the UK in 2019, a woman was jailed after she was jailed for five months after pictures of her partying in Ibiza emerged on social media. She had previously sued the NHS for £2.5 million, after surviving a botched operation. She had argued the operation had left her disabled and the “shadow of a former self” but judges argued that the pictures suggested otherwise.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/…
Content type: Examples
The rise of social media has also been a game changer in the tracking of benefits claimants. Back in 2009, the case of Nathalie Blanchard a woman in Quebec who had lost her disability insurance benefits for depression because she looked “too happy” on her Facebook pictures had made the news.
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/AheadoftheCurve/woman-loses-insurance-benefits-facebook-pics/story?id=9154741
Author: Ki Mae Heussner
Publication: ABC News
Content type: Examples
In the United States, while everyone is surveilled not every is equal when it comes to surveillance. Factors including poverty, race, religion, ethnicity, and immigration status will affect how much you end up being surveilled. This reality has a punitive effect on poor people and their families and places disproportionate burdens on people of minority groups.
https://tcf.org/content/report/disparate-impact-surveillance/?agreed=1
Author: Barton Gellman and Sam Adler-Bell
Publication: The…
Content type: Examples
Virginia Eubanks explains what we can draw from understanding the experience of surveillance of marginalised groups: it is a civil rights issue, technologies carry the bias of those who design them, people are resisting and why we need to move away from the privacy rights discourse.
https://prospect.org/article/want-predict-future-surveillance-ask-poor-communities
Author: Virginia Eubanks
Publication: The American Prospect
Content type: Examples
This article is an overview of some of the research documenting how people in vulnerable positions are the ones most affected by government surveillance.
https://stateofopportunity.michiganradio.org/post/technology-opportunity-researcher-says-surveillance-separate-and-unequal
Author: Kimberly Springer
Publication: State of Opportunity Michigan Radio