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Unfair ID
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Unfair ID

First Edition


October 2024 | 218 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd

We live in an age of digital ID. Through the digitisation of our biometric and demographic selves, digital ID converts human beings into digital data, which in turn mediates access to services and rights – be they public or private, commercial or not-for-profit, essential or non-essential.

Allegedly designed to improve services, and to aid humanitarianism and social inclusion, digital ID has multiple hidden complexities. From denying access to essential goods, to algorithmic bias, to the sharing of sensitive data about vulnerable groups – digital ID is not necessarily just, or balanced, or helping. It is often severely unfair.

This book offers a journey into stories of unfair ID. Exploring examples across sectors, countries and data-managed populations, it takes a data justice perspective on what this unfairness effectively means for the users of digital identity systems. Examples range from denial of food rations to eligible beneficiaries, to the searchability of asylum-seeker data in police force databases, to the algorithmically-determined exclusion of genuinely entitled users from anti-poverty schemes.

This book also explores forms of resistance to these injustices, showing how solidarity movements can resist, engage and challenge the damages of unfair ID. Through its research, it sets out to imagine forms of fair ID where people’s rights and entitlements are upheld, ultimately contributing to build a future of justice for the digitally identified.

Silvia Masiero is an Associate Professor of Information Systems at the HISP Center, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo.

 
Chapter 1: Introduction: Unfair ID
 
PART 1: IDENTITY
 
Chapter 2: The Digitalisation of Identity
 
Chapter 3: Digital ID: A Data Justice Framework
 
PART 2: INJUSTICE
 
Chapter 4: Legal Injustice
 
Chapter 5: Informational Injustice
 
Chapter 6: Design-Related Injustice
 
PART 3: RESISTANCE
 
Chapter 7: On ID, Solidarity and Resistance
 
Chapter 8: Imagining Fair ID

Unfair ID is a must-read for anyone interested in society's digital transformation. Dr. Masiero is uniquely positioned to tell the story of how digital identity systems breed and amplify injustices. Most importantly, she shows us that other futures are possible.

Aaron Martin
Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Data Science, University of Virginia

Silvia Masiero’s book takes us on an ambitious journey of imagining the fairness of IDs across shifting international and conceptual spaces of data’s entanglement with justice, in a world that sees robust systems of surveillance and security to be indispensable.

 

Dr Tarangini Sriraman
Wellcome Research Fellow, Goldsmiths, University of London

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