A/HRC/43/29 strong governance, including a legal and regulatory framework, clear institutional mandates and accountability and independent oversight. 19 37. Financial inclusion is another area in which new technological solutions, such as financial technology or fintech, hold great promise for the greater socioeconomic participation of people. The significant reduction in transaction costs and expanded access precipitated by new technologies, including mobile networks, has made financial services affordable and accessible for many that were previously priced out or considered not creditworthy. As highlighted by the High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation in its report, “many more people [have] the ability to save and transact securely without needing cash, insure against risks, borrow to grow their businesses and reach new markets”. 20 38. Upon closer scrutiny, however, new opportunities for digital financial inclusion are also a source of considerable human rights risks. Mobile money has been widely lauded as bringing financial services to marginalized people and remote regions, and lending platforms are credited with bringing instant digital loans to similarly remote users. At the same time, many of the claimed benefits of these technologies have been disputed, as concerns have arisen that highlight the need for consumer protection and oversight, including overindebtedness and abusive contract enforcement. 21 39. Across the world, new business models enable people with no credit history or physical collateral to demonstrate their creditworthiness, by, for example, allowing lenders to access and model social media profile and phone location data, as well as online transaction and payment histories. These are innovative approaches to modelling credit risk, but as with digital identification, there are important questions to be addressed concerning data privacy, user consent and knowledge regarding the collection and use of data, and the absence of legal and other safeguards. III. Human rights-based responses to new technologies 40. In order to fully reap the benefits of the technological progress under way while minimizing the potential for harm, the development and deployment of new technologies needs to be rooted in strong human rights foundations. 22 As agreed by States and monitored by national, regional and international mechanisms, international human rights law provides a key guiding framework for societies in shaping their responses to the challenges of an ever-changing technological environment. Human rights law sets out substantive and procedural rights, which, if violated, constitute harms that need to be prevented, mitigated or remedied. It imposes corresponding duties on States to respect, promote and protect human rights, and provides a framework for businesses to fulfil their responsibilities to do likewise.23 41. Both Governments and technology companies should ensure that the development and application of new technologies does not pose risks to the enjoyment of human rights. A human rights-based approach entails the application of a number of core principles, including equality and non-discrimination, participation, and accountability, which are also at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals. In addition, new technologies raise the 19 20 21 22 23 World Bank, “Principles on identification for sustainable development: towards the digital age”, February 2018. High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, “The age of digital interdependence”, p. 9. See, for example, Center for Financial Inclusion, “Making digital credit truly responsible”, 25 September 2019. See Human Rights Council resolution 42/15, in which the Council recognized the need to apply international human rights law in the design, development, deployment, evaluation and regulation of individual profiling, automated decision-making and machine learning technologies, and acknowledged that international human rights law should be taken into account in the design, development and deployment of new and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence. Lorna McGregor, Daragh Murray and Vivian Ng, “International human rights law as a framework for algorithmic accountability”, International & Comparative Law Quarterly, vol. 68, No. 2 (April 2019), pp. 309–343. 9