Having such a law, even assuming it met international standards, would not have guaranteed adequate data protection, but it could have helped to ensure better practices and to reduce the potential harm to those whose data has fallen into Taliban hands.
In others, they were designed for foreign governments and militaries.Īfghanistan currently has no data protection law. In some cases, these systems were built for the former Afghan government. “Data collection’s highly intrusive nature and inadequate protections could put people at heightened risk of Taliban abuse.”įoreign governments such as the United States, and international institutions, including United Nations agencies and the World Bank, funded and in some cases built or helped to build vast systems to hold the biometric and other personal data of various groups of Afghans for official purposes. “Governments and organizations that helped amass vast quantities of personal data on large numbers of Afghans may be inadvertently assisting the Taliban repression,” said Belkis Wille, senior crisis and conflict researcher at Human Rights Watch.
The Taliban could use them to target perceived opponents, and Human Rights Watch research suggests that they may have already used the data in some cases. These digital identity and payroll systems contain Afghans’ personal and biometric data, including iris scans, fingerprints, photographs, occupation, home addresses, and names of relatives. The Taliban control systems holding sensitive biometric data that Western donor governments left behind in Afghanistan in August 2021, putting thousands of Afghans at risk, Human Rights Watch said today. A United States military official takes the fingerprints of a man in Afghanistan.
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