How Big Tech Protects Victims’ Privacy in the Fight Against Human Trafficking

How Big Tech Protects Victims’ Privacy in the Fight Against Human Trafficking

How can we measure a crime as pernicious and brutal as human trafficking without endangering the victims behind the numbers?

Stacker compiled resources from the United Nations International Organization for Migration, or IOM, to explain how new discoveries in statistical analysis are helping to shed light on the dark world of human trafficking.

The UN first set out to address this dilemma by partnering with major tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, British Telecommunications and Salesforce, through its Tech Against Trafficking Accelerator program in 2019. It released its first anonymized dataset in 2021 and updated it again. with case data from 2022.

For decades, widely shared statistics on human trafficking have been limited to estimates based on information reported to organizations such as the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or criminal justice statistics, which , experts say, paint a conservative picture, highlighting only cases in which authorities are misinformed. capable of intervening and prosecuting the guilty.

And the available data suffers from another problem: Sharing detailed information about the demographics of people who participate in and are victims of crime risks putting victims in greater danger.

In the 2022 update, UN's partnership with Microsoft and others launched a new way to shed light on…