The authors of a new report on digital identity systems warned “the actual and potential” human rights violations arising from the digital ID model can be “severe and potentially irreversible.”
The 100-page report — “Paving the Road to Hell? A Primer on the Role of the World Bank and Global Networks in Promoting Digital ID” — published by New York University’s (NYU) Center for Human Rights and Global Justice urged human rights organizations to heed the threats posed by a global push for digital IDs.
The NYU researchers said many proponents — including the World Bank — portray digital IDs as a means to achieving greater inclusivity and environmental sustainability when, in fact, the systems are likely to do just the opposite.
According to the report, the digital ID has been dressed up as an “unstoppable juggernaut and inevitable hallmark of modernity and development in the 21st century,” causing dissenting voices to be “written off as Luddites and barriers to progress.”
The authors argued for open debate “with full transparency and involving all relevant stakeholders,” including the most marginalized and most vulnerable.
The authors, who include Christiaan van Veen, L.L.M., special advisor on new technologies and human rights to the United Nations, urged the human rights community and related civic society organizations to ensure that global decisions about the adoption of digital ID systems are not hastily made but are based on “serious evidence and analysis.”
Where digital ID systems threaten human rights, the NYU researchers said, such endeavors should be “stopped altogether.”
Digital ID proponents argue the systems can contribute to inclusivity and sustainable development, with some going so far as to consider the adoption of digital ID systems a prerequisite for the realization of human rights.
But the NYU researchers said they believe the “ultimate objective” of digital ID systems is to “facilitate economic transactions and private sector service delivery while also bringing new, poorer, individuals into formal economies and ‘unlocking’ their behavioral data.”
“The promises of inclusion and flourishing digital economies might appear attractive on paper,” the researchers said, “but digital ID systems have consistently failed to deliver on these promises in real world situations, especially for the most marginalized.”
The authors added:
“In fact, evidence is emerging from many countries, most notably the mega digital ID project Aadhaar in India, of the severe and large-scale human rights violations linked to this model. These systems may in fact exacerbate pre-existing forms of exclusion and discrimination in public and private services. The use of new technologies may furthermore lead to novel forms of harm, including biometric exclusion, discrimination, and the many harms associated with ‘surveillance capitalism.’”
The benefits of using digital ID are “ill-defined” and “poorly documented,” the NYU authors said.
“From what evidence does exist, it seems that those who stand to benefit most may not be those ‘left behind,’ but instead a small group of companies and governments,” they wrote.
They added:
“After all, where digital ID systems have tended to excel is in generating lucrative contracts for biometrics companies and enhancing the surveillance and migration-control capabilities of governments.”
The authors added:
“Like physical roads, national digital identification systems with biometric components (digital ID systems) are presented as the public infrastructure of the digital future.
“Yet these particular infrastructures have proven to be dangerous, having been linked to severe and large-scale human rights violations in a range of countries around the world, affecting social, civil, and political rights.”
The model is not about an individual’s identity alone, confirmed Joseph Atick, Ph.D., executive chairman of the influential ID4Africa, a platform where African governments and major companies in the digital ID market meet.
It’s about their economic interactions, Atick said.
The ID4D model “enables and interacts with authentication platforms, payments systems, digital signatures, data sharing, KYC systems, consent management and sectoral delivery platforms,” Atick announced at the start of ID4Africa’s 2022 annual meeting in mid-June, at the Palais de Congrès in Marrakesh, Morocco.
The authors of the NYU report criticized this model:
“The goal then, is not so much identity as it is identification. The three interlinked processes of identification, registration, and authorization are an exercise of power.
“Through this process, one actor acknowledges or denies another actor’s identity attributes. Individuals may be empowered through the process of identification, but such systems have long been used for the opposite purpose: to deny rights to certain groups and exclude them.”
Third, the authors assessed the nitty-gritty details of how the World Bank and its network of proponents of digital ID systems worked to implement an “identification for development” agenda around the globe.
They explained how the funding and governance of the ID4D Initiative operate, and claimed the World Bank and its corporate and governmental partners are “manufacturing consensus” by presuming that the shift to a digital ID model is inevitable, desirable and required for human progress.
But this “manufactured consensus” lacks a basis, they said.
“Concrete and robust evidence of the purported benefits associated with digital ID systems is rarely provided, it is merely asserted that digital ID will lead to inclusion and development,” the authors wrote.
