Cooper Grabow, Press Corps 13
HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL, General Assembly – In their third day of session in the Human Rights Council, delegations presented their working papers to the committee, and formed mergers with other blocs. One common theme of the papers was the implementation of new technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), to both identify and track sex traffickers, and to use social media to flag potential trafficking activity.
In an exclusive interview with the NAIMUN Daily, the delegation from South Africa discussed their plan for a bilateral approach to technological implementation. The first part of their plan involves a user-based push to increase rural connectivity in regions prone to sex trafficking, that would emphasize an increase in mobile phone usage in order to facilitate reporting of trafficking, leading to more offenders arrested for their crimes.
The second part involves unifying government databases of the individuals being sex trafficked, with the goal of increasing worldwide connection and making the international identification of those trafficked more efficient. The linkage would take advantage of emerging AI technologies that can easily sort through databases of facial images, and compare all of the data in order to verify if two images are of the same person, and flag them if the person is a sex trafficker.
“The power of AI is that you can make a computer that is so smart that it can talk to different databases and cross reference data to get the quickest possible information,” said the South African delegate. “If someone is being trafficked in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and they are on a database in their government, how is the UNHRC going to access that database?”
When asked about potential concerns related to the novelty of artificial intelligence, and the risk of falsely identifying an innocent person as a trafficker, the delegate responded by advocating the utilitarian benefits that they saw with the new technology.
“It is more beneficial to at least attempt to use this tech, instead of the alternative situation which is just letting these people be sex trafficked,” the delegate from South Africa said. “We do see some problems with AI, however, we see that there is a greater benefit as since these technologies get better over time, we need to implement them now, so that when the technology does catch up we have a system in place.”
Many other delegations agreed that the implementation of technology was necessary to creating a long lasting solution to sex trafficking. The delegate from Fiji also proposed artificial intelligence solutions, involving neural networks and deep learning algorithms.
Their proposed solution was to track social media, and watch for repeated patterns and behaviors of known traffickers. It would also scan every direct message sent on popular social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook to try and identify trafficking behavior. When questioned about probable pushback to the drastic change in previous privacy policies, the delegate responded tentatively, but established clear policies to maintain anonymity of the users unless something gets flagged by the technology.
“what we are using for our framework is … pseudonymization [a way to mask information about individuals to protect their privacy], … so we can just find our perpetrators through zero knowledge proofs [a protocol to prove that something is true without revealing any sensitive information about it],” the Fiji delegate stated
Much progress was made through the course of the day, and the delegations finished off by commencing the voting process on their four final resolutions. Tune in to the final NAIMUN Daily online tomorrow to read about what resolutions ended up being passed, and what shenanigans go down in Fun MUN!