Humanitarian aid in the age of COVID-19: A review of big data crisis analytics and the General Data Protection Regulation

The COVID-19 pandemic has served as a wake-up call for humanitarian aid actors to reconsider data collection methods, as old ways of doing business become increasingly obsolete. Although access to information on the affected population is critical now more than ever to support the pandemic response, the limitation of aid workers' presence in the field imposes hard constraints on relief projects. In this article, we consider how aid actors can use "big data" as a crisis response tool to support humanitarian projects, in cases when the General Data Protection Regulation is applicable. We also provide a framework for examining open-source platforms, and discuss the advantages and privacy challenges of big data.