Big Data and the humanitarian sector: emerging trends and persistent challenges

In this chapter we use the example of humanitarian action as a sector that can benefit from the growing amount of data. Humanitarian action has been using Big Data for years and dealt with its challenges in various guidelines and handbooks. Still, the humanitarian community often struggles with gaining access to Big Data owned by private companies. A dependency on the private sector reveals crucial ethical questions and can jeopardise the core humanitarian principles. Such a dependency on the private sector is endangering humanitarian principles and leads to an unequal power-relation between the humanitarian community and the private sector. This suggests that with the emergence of new corporate actors in the humanitarian domain, it is more important than ever to instil an understanding of the role and importance of the humanitarian principles. Otherwise, data philanthropy becomes a tool of ethical whitewashing, while data corporations see humanitarian battlefields as emerging markets of opportunity and human suffering as a form of demand.