Online presence data as human rights risk

Have you ever had to delete parts or all of your online presence because you feared for your life? This story has been on my mind since I read this:

“USAID, the United States’s humanitarian arm, purportedly sent an email over the weekend to partners asking them to go through their social media accounts and websites with a fine-toothed comb to ‘remove photos and information that could make individuals or groups vulnerable’. USAID also advised partners still operating in Afghanistan to delete and wipe any personal identifying information of those they’d worked with on the ground, in case it fell into the wrong hands.”

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/afghanistan-social-media-delete

Are there lessons we can take from this story about data privacy architecture and such? Probably, and out of fairness to these and potentially the next humans who will go through this we should absolutely work through that discussion and create better solutions. For reasons far less grave but still important, we have long needed to re-think the opportunities we have to control where our data goes, who has access to it, and how we can pull it back or lock it down when we need to.

But I don’t want the vastness of that conversation to overshadow the very real experiences people are living through right now. So in the meantime this is just a placeholder of compassion for human beings dealing with an imminent existential threat that is complicated even further by the latticework of digital experiences and data most of us take for granted.

Here’s wishing safety and peace to those who desperately need it.