High above the homeless camps of Seattle, in September 2022, Amazon hosted the first Tech Against Trafficking Summit. It was an elite affair. Project managers and executives from Amazon, Google, Facebook (Meta), Instagram, and Microsoft were present, as were ministers of labour from around the globe. Panellists included government leaders, law enforcement, tech executives, and NGO directors. Only two trafficking survivors made the speakers’ list.
The summit was above all a show of force. Most of the tools presented were built for law enforcement, and safety over privacy appeared to be the mantra. Only the two survivors highlighted the dangers of haphazardly collecting any and all data, a view that was generally scoffed at. Stopping traffickers by any means necessary, the non-survivors said, was more important.
Tech: a tool or a timebomb?
As any survivor of human trafficking will tell you, privacy is safety. They cannot be separated when you are being hunted by the predator you’ve escaped. At odds with this is the fundamental ethos of the tech giants: collect as much data as possible, manipulate it, trade it, and find a way to profit from it.
