The biometric kill squad.

During its occupation of Afghanistan, the US Military had a grand ambition: to build a big data system that could identify over 80% of the Afghan population. That’s 25 million people. 

"We would go into villages and enrol people into this biometric data system," US Marine Special Operations Command veteran Peter Kiernan recalls. "You had a device about 12 inches by six inches wide. It would scan their fingerprints, it would scan their retina, it would also take a picture of them."

The database includes scores of data on Afghan people that worked closely with the US and its allies – as interpreters, fixers, local guides, and so on. 

Then US President Joe Biden pulled the plug on the war, and in the panicked rush to leave Kabul the unthinkable happened. 

The Taliban seized control of the database. 

Brian Dooley, senior adviser to activist group Human Rights First, told the BBC that while very little was definitively known, "a very educated guess would say that [the Taliban] either has or is about to get their hands on an enormous amount of biometric data". 

Now according to the United Nations the Taliban are intensifying their hunt for people who worked for, and collaborated with, Nato and US forces. 

Reuters reported a Kabul resident saying the Taliban’s Al Isha – or ‘kill squad’ – were making house-to-house inspections using a ‘biometrics machine’.

To make matters worse US officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport.

The Taliban’s Al Isha – or ‘kill squad’ – were making house-to-house inspections using a ‘biometrics machine’.

The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city after the Taliban seized control of the country.

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity.

Facebook made moves to protect Afghan users’ accounts during the takeover to try to limit the damage their own store of big data might do. But in 2019 Facebook’s data was breached and more than 533 million user’s private data was stolen from 106 countries, including Afghanistan. The data, unusually, is not for sale on the dark web but downloadable for free from multiple hacker’s forums. 

And this month alone the British Ministry of Defence apologised for its third data breach that has put hundreds of Afghan interpreters at risk of the Al Isha. 

Prevailing wisdom is that big data is good: the more you know about your customers, the more you can super-serve their needs, build brand loyalty, and make more money. For a goliath like Facebook (or Meta, or whatever the hell they want to be called these days) data is their whole business: its value is huge, enormous, off the scale. 

Which is exactly why people want to steal it. 

So having big data means taking responsibility for its safety. And we figure: if three huge, extravagantly funded and seemingly untouchable organisations – like Facebook, The UK’s Ministry of Defence, and the US Military – can’t keep it safe, then no-one can. And that means putting people’s lives and livelihoods at risk. 

This is the problem with big data. 

And that’s why we don’t collect it. 

Instead of storing personal data, once our customer has been onboarded and we’ve ensured they meet the obligations of KYC and AML requirements, and their profile has been downloaded, APLYiD automatically deletes the data within five minutes.  

This means that we are not making money from our customers' personal data. And there’s nothing to hack. Stealing APLYiD’s data is like breaking into a bank just to look for pennies down the back of the sofa in reception.

We won’t be another potential source of data breach that means your customers might lose their money, their homes, their businesses. Or their lives, like we see in Afghanistan. 

After twenty years of war the West has washed its hands of Afghanistan. But – until the big data players scrub their databases too – they’ll keep finding blood on them. 

Image: Wakil KOHSAR / AFP via Getty Images