Three days after Russia invaded Ukraine, a 19-year-old Harvard University student wrote a message in the middle of the night about setting up a website to match Ukrainian refugees to hosts in neighboring countries.
I hope to have it done within 24 hours, and I will release it tomorrow as early as possible. On March 2, they launched UkraineTakeShelter.
There were more than 4,000 hosts on the site when he told the Washington Post about it. According to a Saturday report by Gizmodo, UkraineTakeShelter had more than 60,000 listings and claimed to have secured housing for more than 3000 refugees.
After learning that his comments in UkraineTakeShelter were naive, he ignored the advice of at least one expert on the ground helping the same people he claimed to be.
The teen told Gizmodo that the past few weeks have been very difficult for him. Adding missing information and fixing bugs on the site are some of the things that Schiffmann is still working on. He said he is not trying to develop a platform for human traffickers.
The project is an altruistic effort to help the people of Ukraine.
Local activists on the ground in Poland and experts involved in privacy and humanitarian tech looked at the site with concern, outrage, and horror. The site appeared in overwhelmingly positive stories on CNN, The TODAY Show, and ABC, but that didn't verify the hosts until March. The private data of the hosts opening their homes to refugees has been exposed by the security measures that have been put in place.
The pair have been criticized for ignoring feedback from people on the front lines of the crisis in Ukraine, taking corrective actions only when they faced scrutiny from experts.
Mark Zuckerberg, a software engineer who made his name building a website in a Harvard dorm room, once said it was necessary to move fast and break things.
Raymond stated that the website had already created a problem because it moved faster than the decades-proven processes that aim to keep people safe. Because of the website's flaws, experts have no way of knowing if harm has been done to vulnerable refugees.
He said that this is an amateur hour and that there is a sense that speed is of the essence. There are certain functions in the humanitarian response where slow is safe.
In response to criticism from experts and activists, Schiffmann and Burstein implemented an identity verification process from Stripe that requires hosts to use their passport, drivers license, or other form of government ID in order to post a listing. Criminal and terrorist background checks will be rolled out for hosts in collaboration with the United Nations, major NGOs, and other housing platforms.
Kasia Chojecka, a lawyer who works as a public affairs consultant in the tech sector in Warsaw, Poland, got involved in helping Ukrainians fleeing from war early on, serving as a host for refugees, helping volunteer groups with food deliveries, and supporting a grassroots movement helping refugees
Chojecka told Gizmodo in an email that she was surprised when she heard about the site, noting that she hadn't heard anything from the local activists groups she was involved in. She said that the platform set off all the alarms immediately.
The matter is more delicate than simply putting up a website with a shady security policy because we are not talking about couch surfing, but about a humanitarian crisis.
Chojecka said that she and another colleague reached out to Schiffmann on the social media site to inquire if he was checking out the other initiatives set up by NGOs and other organizations for refugee housing.
She pointed out flaws in the location system and lack of identity verification in a thread on March 9. Many of the refugees are Ukrainian women and children, so she was concerned about the lack of identity verification.
The head of the global communications service at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees told Gizmodo in an email that it was "incredibly touching" to see the support.
We know from other emergencies that there are dangers of sexual exploitation, abuse, gender-based violence and trafficking hidden among helpers and responders, so we need to be prepared from the start.
There are many private initiatives that have been set up and launched in the last few weeks, so she did not have a specific comment on UkraineTakeShelter.
In an interview with Gizmodo, Chojecka said she had a problem with the site's lack of education about the refugee experience for hosts, the fact that it did not translate listings into multiple languages, and the fact that it had listings from places as far away as Canada
What if the host turns out to be a scam? What if there is violence? Who pays for the ticket? What if a person from Ukraine is in a completely foreign country and they don't get support from the host because they didn't sign up? These are real stories that happen and have happened already in the crisis, and many organizations introduce additional rules or methods of verification on the basis of that.
Chojecka said that the website was harmful to refugees and urged others not to recommend it. She told Gizmodo that she felt attacked for speaking out about her concerns about UkraineTakeShelter.
A little more than a week later, her criticisms went viral on the social networking site, though someone else was making them. The person speaking up was Bill Fitzgerald, an American privacy researcher, who pointed out the same things Chojecka had earlier from the other side of the Atlantic. Fitzgerald's critiques made waves, unlike Chojecka's.
Fitzgerald said that Chojecka should have received attention. In an interview with Gizmodo, the privacy researcher said the response was more than a bit sexist.
The fact that I am a middle aged straight white American man who works in tech getting attention for essentially repeating what a more qualified, more informed woman said two weeks before I said it, is part of the problem as well.
Schiffmann has used technology before to solve a problem. He earned the Webby Person of the Year Award in 2020 for his covid-19 tracker, which became one of the most popular in the world. He worked with other high school students around the world to create 2020protests.com, a site that tracked where Black Lives Matter protests were happening.
He told Gizmodo that he was motivated to create UkraineTakeShelter after he attended a protest against the war in Ukraine in San Diego.
Many of the Ukrainian speakers were around my age. It helped me imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes, as they were my friends and peers. It was frightening. I realized that I had to do something. I couldn't just attend a local protest and hold up a sign.
The teen started to investigate how he could help the Ukrainians because of his coding skills and large platform. He quickly realized that there were millions of refugees fleeing to countries all over Europe.
He found a network of thousands of Facebook groups and saw that refugees were posting information about themselves in order to find someone to take them in. He considered that the forms set up by some websites to help match refugees to families wouldn't scale and were already overwhelmed. He thought the groups were confusing for refugees. Schiffmann got to work on the project based on this assessment.
Many people, including Chojecka and Fitzgerald, were able to find a number of alarming issues despite the fact that the site was developed by a cybersecurity expert. There were many suspicious listings on the platform, with some people posting job ads looking for seamstresses or nurses. Others were looking for women and children. Gizmodo had to pass a reCAPTCHA test in order to gain access to phone numbers and email addresses. In a future update, refugees will have to register on the site and pass an identity check in order to see host contact information, according to Schiffmann.
Raymond, the humanitarian tech expert at Yale, said that there is a desire to make complex political problems simple and technological.
When asked by Gizmodo why he didn't take action on the issues pointed out by Chojecka, the Polish volunteer, he said he had looked into other actions.
He feels that he can't control what others say about him, and that he never attacked Chojecka on social media. He said he didn't have any contact with anyone who replied to her.
The teen pointed out that he received tens of thousands of messages across so many social platforms, and that Chojecka's comments were just some of them. He said that he has been working on so many things at the same time and that none of the groups he was working with on social media brought up the issues with him.
None of the groups I had worked with had raised concerns about the verification process for hosts, and while adding more verification processes was a priority on my list, I was doing 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884 888-349-8884
When he saw the thread from Fitzgerald, the American privacy researcher, he immediately took action and released a massive rewrite of the host sign up process.
He has talked to Chojecka, Fitzgerald, and others. Some of them wanted to work with him. Chojecka said she didn't have an extensive conversation with Schiffmann, but Fitzgerald confirmed the teen's account, saying that he believed that the core problems of UkraineTakeShelter were being mitigated.
Overall, I want everyone to know that I am listening to criticism, and that I am continuing to improve this platform. Since I launched the project on March 2nd, I have done nothing. I eat dinner while on the phone with NGOs.
Raymond, the humanitarian tech expert from Yale, said it was good that Schiffmann had implemented identity verification. He felt that the fix was insufficient.
It's like trying to put on a parachute after you jump out of a plane. Where have people left, and who have they left with? Raymond said that it was about double verification, not only on the host, but on the populations.
Raymond thinks that UkraineTakeShelter should be stopped to avoid causing harm to refugees. He said that Burstein should contact the agency and ask for help to fix the issues with the site. He said that the site's founders should bring in Polish and other local actors in the host communities to see if UkraineTakeShelter can be integrated into the systems that are already in place. If the site can't connect solutions that are already in place, it should be shut down.
Fitzgerald said that tech solutions launched by people with minimal experience working on specific problems often fail to address these problems. He said that the initial launch of UkraineTakeShelter had serious flaws, but now it was time to decide whether to judge the site by its past failures or move forward based on where it is now. He thinks the site is safer than it was a week ago.
Multiple experts who spoke to Gizmodo said that UkraineTakeShelter was a cautionary tale on what not to do with technology and an example of what happens when the media doesn't thoroughly vet a platform and focuses on telling a positive story. Until this week, no mainstream media outlet had taken into account the security flaws and risks of UkraineTakeShelter.
The situation started out with a good intention, but it was too big from the beginning and didn't coordinate with anyone on the ground.
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By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.Chojecka said that we should now concentrate on how to help Ukrainians, states, NGOs and other volunteers and how to coordinate already existing work and not on how to clean the mess that one site is causing.
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