Human rights, technology and poverty

This chapter explores the use of digital technologies to measure and alleviate poverty, and the implications for rights. Until now the field of development has mainly paid attention to those rights explicitly connected to digital communications, such as informational privacy and freedom of expression. We argue that instead, with new data sources such as mobile phones and internet use, a fundamental change is occurring in the way poverty is addressed. This change has implications for a wide range of rights, including economic, political, social and cultural rights, and implies that development actors should not address digital technologies as neutral. Instead they are ways of seeing, knowing and engaging with livelihoods and poverty that are not inherently benevolent and may be exploitative. In order to contribute to poverty alleviation, digital technologies and the global data economy must be understood in relation to the power and information asymmetries they (re)produce