Social protection programmes can be broadly understood as government support for individuals to meet basic human needs, protecting citizens from the “economic risks and insecurities of life”. They range from ensuring all children are properly nourished every day through the provision of free school meals, to ensuring equality of all people in health by financing healthcare for all.
Privacy International has been researching how emergency welfare responses have been handled in different countries in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite the variety of socio-economic and political contexts of the countries researched, PI has found that a lot of them share common concerning elements along the benefit disbursement process, namely the automation of eligibility processes, lack of transparency, excessive data collection, security issues in disbursement methods and more.
In this piece we outline the main discussions and measures we need to see being systematically adopted to inform decision-making about digital solutions in the health sector, and provide examples of where these were not integrated in decision-making processes and with what consequences.
The global Covid-19 pandemic has acted as a catalyst for technology-intensive initiatives for welfare distribution, coming at a high cost to human rights and inclusion: enforcing automated discrimination, exacerbating existing inequalities and compromising access to essential benefits.
Governments around the world are increasingly making registration in national ID systems mandatory for populations to access social benefits, healthcare services, and other forms of state support. By virtue of their design, these systems inevitably exclude certain population groups from obtaining an ID and hence from accessing essential resources to which they are entitled.
