Table I

Summary of the challenges of big data in humanitarian missions

AuthorChallenges highlighted
Crutcher and Zook (2009) Relevance of race in the way people use/ do not use internet-based services; the gap in the use of mobile technologies among different races will continue to remain with new devices and technologies coming in
Muralidharan et al. (2011) Comparison of NGO and media use of Twitter and Facebook; lack of two-way communication
Gao et al. (2011) Privacy and safety concerns; incorrect data
Weisenfeld (2011) Disparity of data collection methodologies; too much data and too little data are both problematic
Munro (2013) Overstated role of social media and international actors in Haiti; quality and training of volunteers; keeping the volunteers motivated
Shanley et al. (2013) Problems of trust, privacy, security and ethics
Shelton et al. (2014) Unreliability of social media data; enhancement of social inequality because of digital divide; bigger size of the data sets not a sole guarantee of correct decision
Alexander (2014) Ethical issues of using social media in emergencies
Sandvik et al. (2014) Likely disregard of principles of humanity, neutrality and impartiality
Crawford and Finn (2015) Ethical, epistemological and ontological challenges of data collection, analysis and deployment
Burns and Thatcher (2015) Incompleteness of data due to digital divide; contextual disconnect of the volunteers
Haworth and Bruce (2015) Lack of data quality assurance and issues surrounding data management, liability, security and the digital divide
Duffield (2016) Digital humanitarianism resulting in bunkerization of workers; problems of security and privacy
Carley et al. (2016) Non-uniform distribution of tweet source; difference in languages being used
Landwehr et al. (2016) Limitations of Twitter data; linguistic problems; unevenness locations of the data sources
Mulder et al. (2016) Creation of digital inequalities because of big data making process; mutation of facts through the transfer
Read et al. (2016) Issues of digital divide; likely flow of disinformation
Qadir et al. (2016) Problems due to volume, variety, velocity, veracity, verification and validity of big data; issues of volunteers; privacy and digital divide
Dufty (2016) Unreliability of Twitter in disaster management
Cinnamon et al. (2016) Social and ethical challenges of using mobile phone CDR and SMS in disease disaster management
Murthy and Gross (2017) Lack of two-way communication; problem of finding meaningful information from large data sets
Haworth (2017) Issues of digital divide, trust and uneven power relations

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