Expanding Perspectives on Data Privacy: Insights from Rural Togo

Emily Aiken

Abstract:

Passively collected “big” data sources are increasingly used to inform critical development policy decisions in
low- and middle-income countries. While prior work highlights how such approaches may reveal sensitive
information, enable surveillance, and centralize power, less is known about the corresponding privacy concerns,
hopes, and fears of the people directly impacted by these policies — people sometimes referred to as experiential
experts. To understand the perspectives of experiential experts, we conducted semi-structured interviews with
people living in rural villages in Togo shortly after an entirely digital cash transfer program was launched that
used machine learning and mobile phone metadata to determine program eligibility. This paper documents
participants’ privacy concerns surrounding the introduction of big data approaches in development policy. We
find that the privacy concerns of our experiential experts differ from those raised by privacy and development
domain experts. To facilitate a more robust and constructive account of privacy, we discuss implications for
policies and designs that take seriously the privacy concerns raised by both experiential experts and domain
experts