In 2011, as the hunt for Osama bin Laden was intensifying and honing in on a region of Pakistan, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used a fake hepatitis vaccination campaign as part of its intelligence operation. The campaign went door to door, under the pretense of public health, in the hope of finding evidence of bin Laden’s hideout. Such initiatives are not new. The history of vaccines in the Global South is fraught with abuse, mismanagement and deception. And the costs have been high. Vaccine hesitancy, particularly in the Global South, has led to distrust in what are safe, life-saving scientific advances for the treatment of some of the deadliest…

If there were any doubts about how dependent we have become on digital technologies in our daily lives, the pandemic has surely dispelled them. At the same time, the pandemic has raised to the forefront some of the implications of this digital dependence — and the divides within this dependence — that have very real health, public safety, social and economic consequences. There are far too many prominent societal divides to list, but here are five technology-related divides that were top of mind in 2020. First, the access divide: Our need to physically separate has made digital technologies and services almost indispensable to carrying out daily routines and keeping in…

The changes in the ways that women experience violence require new forms of support at a time when service provisions are becoming more difficult to provide. Technology plays a vital role in accessing services that support women who are being harmed by this online violence. With restrictive health guidelines in place, many organizations no longer offer in-person services and are finding it challenging to adapt to this new reality. Some organizations can reach their clients over the phone or the internet to provide supports, but this can be problematic for several reasons. For one, women who are struggling financially may not be able to afford the technology needed to connect…

UK organization, the Paladin National Stalking Advocacy Service, reported a 50 percent increase in reports of stalking between March and June 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. Interviews with Paladin staff and clients reported that stalkers had changed their stalking behaviour during the pandemic. Their clients reported more technology-facilitated stalking and abuse by their stalkers, including increases in intimate images being distributed without their consent and fake social media profiles being used to impersonate them. As women are required to rely more on online services and communication tools, their stalkers have additional avenues for perpetrating their online abuse. One woman Paladin supported suspected that her stalker had placed…

Women have been targeted in their schools and workplaces where they have had no choice but to participate online. Research from Ryerson University’s Infoscape Research Lab examined early trends in Zoom-bombing — a form of harassment where the attacker posts offensive and shocking content to disrupt virtual meeting spaces. It found that most Zoom-bombings that were posted on YouTube were racist (25 percent), misogynistic (43 percent), homophobic (14 percent) or otherwise offensive. They were typically directed at female teachers’ classrooms. As this disturbing trend spread, women and other equality-seeking groups demanded that companies like Zoom develop safeguards and provide instruction on how to protect their workplaces from discriminatory online harassment.…

Humanity will remember 2020 as the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is the year that people were expected to move their lives online and technology became the main outlet for connection outside the home. This made life more complicated as individuals and institutions had to quickly adapt to new online programs, navigating their personal and professional relationships through digital portals. As the ability to choose what day-to-day interactions looked like became more limited, women felt the strains of the pandemic in highly gendered ways. Many lost their jobs because their work could not be adapted to online work-from-home positions, or had to reduce their time at work in order…

The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating global digital transformation and the adoption of digital technologies. It is also enacting a political and cultural shift toward a quantified society: a society in which measurement and predictive modelling dominate (political) decision making, and where surveillance is expansive and pervasive. While viruses and disease have always been with us, what’s changing is our ability to measure and understand them. This ability comes at a time when globalization (and, by extension, climate change) has transformed the kinds of viruses and diseases we will face. The knowledge of what can kill us — or is killing us — compels governments and health authorities to both take…

Last year, more people started to ask the right questions of platforms. Beyond the questions of who should set what terms of online speech and how, lay another important question — when should that someone set the terms. The deceptively simple issue of timing has laid bare the inconsistencies in platforms’ policies and the harm that they can wreak. We have seen this play out in three dimensions over the past year: political violence, voting and vaccines. Since 2016, it was clear that Donald Trump would undermine election results if he did not win. The problem was merely delayed by his victory in November 2016. In summer 2020, a high-level…