‘Good’ Digital ID at the Stockholm Internet Forum (SIF)
I attended a great session on ‘Good’ Digital ID at the Stockholm Internet Forum 20121 (SIF) convened by SIDA. The discussion was extensive: financial inclusion, privacy, impacts on vulnerable groups as refugees, trust framework, open-source technology, social protection, biometrics, covid response, gender equity, digital transformation, institutional arrangements, independent organizations, etc.
There is a clear consensus on the importance of respect the inclusion principle of identification. However, it is far from being a reality in a lot of countries. Indeed, balancing security, trust, and inclusion is not an easy objective.
Emrys Schoemaker, the moderator of the debate, proposed three questions in advance to guide the discussions:
1 — What do ‘good’ digital identity systems look like to you? What are they achieving to make them good?
2 — What is the main thing we need to do to achieve this ‘good’ ID system? What is the priority action we can take to achieve these goals?
3 — What are the tensions between these different definitions of ‘good’ digital identification systems? Finally, what are the trade-offs between different visions of digital identity systems?
I prepared the following notes for my intervention:
I’m speaking from Brazil, and two things shaped my vision about identification: the inequality of Brazilian society and the fragmentation of administrative records of personal identity. Brazil doesn’t have a national identity system, leading to fraud and inefficiency, but it mainly reinforces inequality.
We know that there are numerous examples of bad and malfunction identification schemes that lead to:
Exclusion
Discrimination
Persecution
Economic costs
Surveillance
Profiling
Because of these problems, some people are totally against any identification, especially those that use biometrics.
Brazilian historical experience of slavery and authoritarian periods show this clearly. But, even during a Democratic moment, the lack of an official identification scheme leads to exclusion and discrimination. In other words, the difference between the remedy and the poison is just the dosage.
How to define a “good id”?
I consider that the idea of a “good id” implies both a “new” conceptualization and a social movement.
Tolstoi said that “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We cannot expect much of the concept of good id to the point of believing that it is Tolstoy’s happy family.
For me, “Good id” can be characterized by:
. Identification as an individual right
. Institutionalized by a civil organization, not by the police
. linkages between civil registration and identification
. on individuals having the control over their credentials (paper or digital)
. On identity credentials allowing access to multipurpose services
. And on data minimization and respect for privacy
As a movement, “good id” is contributing to redesign the discussion about identification in a digital world. Particularly, I appreciate the way it involves more civil society organizations and empowers individuals.
However, we should never forget to avoid reinventing the wheel. Identification is a field that has been developing since the end of the XIX century. Many “new” ideas and practices have been refined since then. For example, the characterization of “good id” that I proposed here was quoted from the work of Juan Vucetich, the Croatian immigrant in Argentina. He, around 1916, developed the core of what even today we practice as legal identification. Yes, one of the founding fathers of the identification movement was an immigrant, which makes perfect sense to me.
#SIF21 #Sida #StockholmInternetForum #GoodID #LegalIdentity #SGD16.9
