How governments use Big Data to violate human rights

The right to privacy has become a pressing human rights issue. Big data -- combined with artificial intelligence and facial recognition software -- has the capacity to intrude on people's lives in unprecedented ways, in some cases on a massive scale. While much of the discussion has focused on how social media and tech companies use the data they collect about their users, more attention needs to be paid to the wider relationship between violations of privacy and other types of human rights abuses. Mass invasions of privacy can undermine the rights of millions, if not billions, of people around the world as governments gain a greater capacity to discriminate -- or worse -- across gender and sexuality lines, and stifle dissent, including through violence. So what can be done to limit the human rights fallout?