'Digital identity as platform-mediated surveillance' by Silvia Masiero in (2023) 10(1) Big Data and Society comments
Digital identity systems are usually viewed as datafiers of existing populations. Yet a platform view finds limited space in the digital identity discourse, with the result that the platform features of digital identity systems are not seen in relation to their surveillance outcomes. In this commentary I illuminate how the core platform properties of digital identity systems afford the undue surveillance of vulnerable groups, leading users into the binary condition of either registering and being profiled, or giving up essential benefits from providers of development programmes. By doing so I contest the “dark side” narrative often applied to digital identity, arguing that, rather than just a side, it is the very inner matter of digital identity platforms that enables surveillance outcomes.
Masiero argues
The term digital identity indicates the conversion of human identities into digital data. In digital identity schemes functions of identification, authentication and authorisation are performed digitally (Nyst et al., 2016): these functions indicate, respectively, the registration of individuals into identity databases, individuals’ ability to assert their own identity, and, as a result of that, their authorisation to access products or services. Built as an enabler of authorisation to access key services, digital identity has become part of efforts towards Sustainable Development Goal 16:9, to “provide legal identity for all including free birth registrations” (United Nations, 2015). Digital identity schemes are indeed meant to match subjects with their entitlements, preventing fraud and at the same time ensuring that correct provisions are supplied in development programmes (Gelb and Clark, 2013; Gelb and Metz, 2018).
Countering this narrative, studies across disciplines have seen digital identity associated to erroneous exclusions of genuinely entitled users (Drèze et al., 2017; Muralidharan et al., 2020), as well as undue redirections of economic development policy (Masiero and Arvidsson, 2021). Coexistence of data-based social assistance with techniques of policing and profiling, resulting into what Iazzolino (2021) refers to as “infrastructures of compassionate repression”, has added to the same narrative. The result is that a digital-identity-for-development (D4D) orthodoxy, while diffused in policymaking, is systematically questioned on empirical grounds (Beduschi, 2019; Weitzberg et al., 2021).
In portraying the digital identity orthodoxy and its problematisations, a view of digital identity systems as datafiers dominates the literature (Masiero and Shakthi, 2020). A datafier perspective views digital identity as a tool for the conversion of human beings into data: through that conversion subjects are matched to entitlements, preventing erroneous inclusion and exclusion (Gelb and Clark, 2013). But the same perspective illuminates how injustice is produced through digital identity, from the persistence of exclusion errors to undue profiling and enablement of policies that affect anti-poverty programme and aid recipients negatively (Martin and Taylor, 2021; Taylor, 2017; Weitzberg et al., 2021).
Instrumental to understand data-induced injustice, a datafier perspective still leaves a gap: alone, it does not fully illustrate the core process through which digital identity operates. Illuminating such a process is a view of digital identity schemes as platforms where a core, a central ID database, serves as the basis for the construction of complements by third parties (Masiero and Arvidsson, 2021). A platform view suggests that platform features inform the outcomes of digital identity, from undue exclusions to distortion of social protection monitoring and redirection of policy away from people's needs (Masiero and Arvidsson, 2021).
In this commentary I suggest that a platform view is essential to understand the workings of digital identity and, crucially, its surveillance outcomes. In surveillance studies literature, data-based profiling is teleologically linked to tracing and, in turn, to different modes of repression of the surveilled (Akbari and Gabdulhakov, 2019; Murakami Wood and Monahan, 2019). I argue that a platform perspective is key to understanding the roots of such outcomes, which stem from the core-complements architecture of digital identity systems. If it is so, the popular idea of a “dark side” of digital identity loses its meaning: rather than a “side”, it is the very architecture of digitally identity platforms to enable their surveillance outcomes.
Three views of digital identity
Masiero and Shakthi (2020) put forward a taxonomy of views of digital identity. In such a taxonomy, a datafier view is juxtaposed to alternative visions centred on platforms and routes to surveillance.
Datafier view
A long-established view sees digital identity in its role as a datafier, meant as a converter of individuals into data. In this perspective, as argued in Srinivasan and Johri (2013), technology creates “machine-readable men”, so that datafied individuals can be matched with their entitlements. This enables two core operations in social protection schemes: the recognition of entitled beneficiaries and, subsequently, the assignation of entitlements to them (Masiero and Das, 2019). Yet, it is the same view to back the study of digital identity injustice: exclusion of entitled users, diversion of entitlements from social protection programmes, and intrusions into humanitarian action are all predicated on a datafier vision (e.g., Chaudhuri, 2021; Madon and Schoemaker, 2021; Martin and Taylor, 2021).
Platform view
Integrating the datafier view, Masiero and Arvidsson (2021) illuminate a vision centred on the platform architecture of digital identity systems. In such an architecture, a core consists of the database where the demographic and biometric data of enrolees are stored. Upon the core, boundary resources such as Application Programme Interfaces (APIs) and Software Development Kits (SDKs) allow the construction of complements, which consist e.g., in public service agencies enabling access through digital authentication. In the platform view the functions of identification, authentication and authorisation theorised in Nyst et al. (2016) become evident: it is, however, the technical vision of platform components that overshadows its effects. Paradigmatically of this view, Madon et al. (2022) note that “the platform architecture provides scope for government to orchestrate the functioning of a range of local government and third-party players towards service delivery.”
Surveillance view
Beyond datafier and platform perspectives, a surveillance view is centred on the profiling and policing outcomes of digital identity. Instances are centred on linkings of access to digital identity data to police violence, capture and deportation (Akbari and Gabdulhakov, 2019; Murakami Wood and Monahan, 2019). A surveillance view confronts the D4D orthodoxy with the harm caused by profiling: Newell et al.'s study of the US-Mexico border (2016: 178) notes, for example, how research suggests “a causal link between the U.S. government's border control policies and rapidly increasing numbers of migrant deaths.” Differently from a platform view, whose focus is on platform architecture, a surveillance view centres on the surveillant outcomes that digital identity produces.
All three perspectives are important in conceptualising digital identity, with the platform view holding more explicative power than it is commonly recognised. ...
