New tech interventions are being tested on refugee camp populations – and they can’t opt out

Found at Current Affairs.

I started out as a UX researcher in a large organisation that services almost every resident of Australia. We were always looking for new ways to put designs in front of those people, and to get them to interact and provide feedback on our designs in ways that suited us. I’m always worried about how far that logic – to test on (un)willing, captive audiences – might extend, and this article doesn’t leave me feeling good about things.

It covers a lot of interesting and timely ground about who refugee camps really serve, but one case study struck me in particular: a pilot program run by the UN World Food Program in two refugee camps in Jordan. In these camps, “residents must access their food supplies through a biometric tracking system using privately developed blockchain technology”.

Large organisation, new technology that needs testing, captive audience.

The UN plans to expand this program to more than half a million Syrians in Jordan. Refugees are treated as a commodity, and refugee camps become “a venue for experimenting with tracking technologies and actively incorporating more and more people – who can’t opt out, if they want to eat – into a globally sourced public-private data web.”