Being reviewed:
Taking Privacy Seriously: How to Create the Rights We Need While We Still Have Something to Protect
Data Sovereignty: From the Digital Silk Road to the Return of the State
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In 2019, the World Food Programme partnered with controversial analytics firm Palantir to develop a logistics management platform (DOTS). Although it drew criticism from privacy activists and donors, the partnership remains active today, suggesting that public and sectoral objections cannot halt such public-private collaborations, even in the humanitarian sector. This is but one example of the ways humanitarian infrastructures over-rely on private technology, which depends on a few key actors, or—as in the case of low earth orbit satellites—a single one. Ongoing tech-facilitated violence in Gaza, Iran, and Ukraine, the ascendancy of generative AI platforms amid subdued or outpaced regulation, and larger shifts in the geopolitical order all raise new questions about what will come of the humanitarian embrace of tech.
These choices are being made amid fears of a disintegrating humanitarian sector, torn apart by the severance of USAID funding and cuts elsewhere. Read any article or blog post on the sector and the question, whether implicit or explicit, is the same: What kind of humanitarianism will emerge from this momentous upheaval? To some, tech—automating workflows, shifting to remote modalities, or integrating systems—seems like a good way to stretch the humanitarian budget while retaining a semblance of business as usual. But this intense datafication introduces a new scale of risk, as made apparent by the June 2026 disclosure that the World Food Programme’s beneficiary self-registration system in Gaza had been breached, affecting the data of over 2 million vulnerable people. It also beckons a digital dependency that overrepresents corporate technology, given that the sector lacks many of the resources required to undergo this transformation on its own. Reliance on these companies and their platforms may, however, deepen the usurpation of humanitarian actors by corporate-owned and operated services.
The chosen technologies change how humanitarian work is operationalized. Sidelined and diminished humanitarian agency means the sector’s work becomes susceptible to other tendencies embedded within technology. Many of these tools require or enable the collection of vast amounts of data, tracking and tracing the movement and decisions of those interacting with humanitarian assistance. This extensive data collection and monitoring gives rise to what some experts have called the surveillance-humanitarian complex and others characterize as platform humanitarianism.
Although humanitarians are not explicitly in the business of surveilling, they are very much in the business of monitoring and tracking. This impulse—when combined with tools that are being emphatically deployed to surveil or can feed into the surveillance desires of other actors—enables humanitarians to exert control over the individuals they are supposed to help. It is hard to isolate the functionality of extensive data collection from larger surveillance instincts. Highly detailed information on intimate choices around movement or economic decisions provides hostile actors vast ability to control vulnerable groups, just as this information may enable the anticorruption or registration efforts of humanitarians.
This dynamic creates a slippage, where data is collected to look at the whole—perhaps the needs of a displaced population—but then turns toward the parts: the actual individuals who compose the data. Anne SY Cheung captures the contours of this in her chapter in Data Sovereignty, an edited volume by Anupam Chander and Haochen Sun. Cheung shows the way that normalization of data collection for one purpose exposes individuals to privacy violations elsewhere—such as through the tracking of a person’s movements.
These vignettes force us to reflect on humanitarian decision making around technology. James Rule’s Taking Privacy Seriously centers political agency as a critical mode for recovering rights. He emphasizes debates over privacy as political rather than technological fights, and argues that humans need to be more discerning about which technological systems we accept and decline.
Humanitarians have long negotiated the intricacies of the nation-state system to varied instances of success, complication, and compromise. In doing so they have established degrees of independence that technological uptake threatens to erase. The question is whether the sector can make different data and technology choices. To do so, they must articulate a concept of data sovereignty derived from humanitarian principles—an especially important task given recent efforts to remove aid work from the humanitarian realm that suggest the sector may face yet more challenges to its work.
Humanitarian organizations need to rethink their relationship to tech, be less deferential to corporate execs pitching their wares, and recover their duties as a platform for human dignity.
Unpicking the increasingly intricate surveillance-humanitarian complex and the creeping encirclement of humanitarian operational independence requires revisiting long-standing questions about privacy and its protection, and newer concerns about the possibilities for AI guardrails and data sovereignty.
Focusing solely on the mechanics of privatization within humanitarian action is insufficient to articulate precisely how this privatization interacts with humanitarians’ ability to maintain oversight and control of their operations. Viewing this privatization through a data sovereignty lens instead drives a deeper understanding of how technology shifts power and imperils efforts to maintain humanitarian principles. Further, it prompts us to consider how different systems shape one another when they interact in the humanitarian context. Chander and Sun’s Data Sovereignty includes accounts of digital sovereignty in trade, financial, and regional contexts. Humanitarian work does not fit neatly into any of these categories, yet the contestation of humanitarian data space warrants a closer consideration of data sovereignty. Reappraising humanitarian technological decisions through data sovereignty exposes the competing choices that in turn shape how technologies are actually experienced and how harm manifests.
With so many players vested in the proliferation of technology within humanitarian work, the lens of digital sovereignty can help expose how technological uptake narrows the humanitarian horizon of choice. Chander and Sun argue that “While China pioneered data sovereignty, it is now the demand of governments from Australia to Zimbabwe. The era of countries unsure whether they had the power to regulate the Internet is over.” Where do humanitarian organizations fit in this formulation? They are often compelled by bigger commercial organizations offering discounts and complete technological environments—even though these platforms are not designed explicitly for humanitarians. They also frequently face pressure from donor governments that have been noted for their keenness for auditability, which can restrict humanitarians to certain tools and require them to collect vast amounts of data.
Thus the space for independent humanitarian action becomes heavily constrained, suffocated by technological and political pressures on all sides. This filters decisions around tech, meaning humanitarians are rarely selecting tools explicitly or solely for those receiving assistance. Humanitarians need a stronger sense of why they choose certain tools; absent this clarity, it is easy for technology to spread without intention or reflection. Digital identity and biometrics use is one area where this is palpable; both were introduced in response to registration challenges but have since ballooned to become unintended gatekeepers to assistance.
So what then is the playbook for navigating this moment? Should humanitarians be developing new approaches for technologies when such tools and platforms substantially change their operations, or do they need instead more overarching detailed policies broad enough to guide use across an evolving digital landscape? These questions cannot be answered in isolation, for here humanitarians brush up against an enduring ambiguity that is in many ways at the heart of humanitarian work: the dependency on the goodwill of other actors to facilitate access and services. It is a bind that humanitarians have long noted. Data protection efforts too depend on compliance from nonhumanitarian actors, but humanitarians themselves have limited range to compel compliance.
Humanitarians are actively trying to reflect on their technology use and the complexities that accompany it. Two important humanitarian actors—the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)—recently co-organized expert perspectives on this very matter. Shared sectoral reflection can help situate changing approaches to technology, allowing conversations to emerge and merge organically. Where Rule emphasizes the political nature of corralling technology, Urs Gasser and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger concentrate on the social roots that co-constitute “guardrails.” What we should take away from their focus on sociopolitical approaches to governing technology is not that there is no use to technical limitations, but that most of the battle for how technology is used is fought within nontechnical spaces.
Adding more private actors into the mix does not help—especially when they are being used at integral access junctures or even to determine access in the first place, for example with the deployment of fintech and digital identity “solutions” to deliver aid. As America continues to recede and Chinese interest in the development and humanitarian sectors grows, it is likely that the mix of corporate actors that humanitarians encounter will change substantially. Whether they provide leading payment platforms like Alipay, cutting-edge AI tools like DeepSeek, or more traditional connectivity hardware (Huawei, ZTE, etc.), Chinese companies may be an increasingly considered alternative in a struggling humanitarian ecosystem.
Here too a data sovereignty lens shifts questions of humanitarian technology procurement, inviting discussion of how tech companies transcend the nation-state and therefore further loosen humanitarian oversight. This is part of a long-standing narrative regarding how corporations have increasingly fashioned themselves as beyond the bounds of national sovereignty. “Transnational corporations” were the first wave, but tech companies, and especially social media companies like Meta, have endeavored to extend this impression. Some believe they cannot be regulated because they cut across traditional nation-state lines. However, although it has proven tricky to reign in social media platforms, it is not impossible. The EU has been a leader in this regard, but other instances of more country-specific pressures have resulted in tech companies having to capitulate too.
Well-meaning humanitarians have been sold a narrative that is not always true: one where tech companies are all powerful, all knowing, and influential, their innovation superseding humanitarian knowledge, principles, or other constraints. Everyone participates: donors, boosters, nation-states, and the companies themselves. Recent events, however, have reasserted the primacy of the nation-state. Tariff wars in particular have shown how, through choice or circumstance, companies have had to fall in line with the nation-state. We are now seeing technology firms explicitly trying to align themselves with political power (as is very much the case in the US) or being impacted regardless by international tensions. Here, the chapters on trade regulation in the Data Sovereignty volume offer insights into these exercises of power.
The sector finds itself at a critical moment—decisions being made now could rewrite how humanitarianism is done. As private-sector organizations become more involved in aid provision, they meet poorly prepared humanitarians lacking confidence in their own stated principles. Meanwhile, deference to humanitarians is rapidly disappearing, as demonstrated by the privatization of relief assistance, attacks on aid workers, and the closing of aid corridors.
In all this, it is easy to look around and think that humanitarian principles have reached their nadir. But humanitarian values offer keys to a space where compassion can transcend the limitations of nation-states and the profit incentive of commercial operators. To reach that space, humanitarian organizations need to rethink their relationship to tech, be less deferential to corporate execs pitching their wares, and recover their duties as a platform for human dignity. 
This article was commissioned by Mona Sloane.
