ABSTRACT
This chapter takes concerns about digital data protection and considers their implications for the humanitarian principle of independence. Independence is often a necessity to achieve all other humanitarian principles: humanity (to alleviate human suffering wherever it exists), impartiality (to distribute aid based on the severity of need alone), and neutrality (to avoid, and be seen to avoid, giving material advantage to one side of a conflict). The chapter uses structuration theory to argue that humanitarians’ use of digital technology remediates their relationships with other actors in ways that dramatically swell both the quantity of data production and the number of connections through which they can potentially interface with each other. It uses the theory to further argue that this remediation creates dependency on digital technology and normalises digitalisation and connectivity as intrinsically valuable. Such dramatic growth in data and the number of connections provides both the motivation and the means for data collected as part of humanitarian programming to be appropriated by others for use towards political, military, or economic objectives. The chapter argues that such appropriation constitutes a clear violation of humanitarian independence as it is conventionally understood. It closes with topline recommendations for regaining independence, which build on and extend existing thinking around data protection.
