I long hoped that research in the digital ID space could be an epitome of justice, and that overcoming unfair forms of identification and authentication could lead to strengthening fundamental rights where these are threatened. The state of the world does not support this conclusion. Denial of digital rights is reinforcing existing forms of oppression: the ongoing war on Palestine, in which the Gaza strip is subject to a long telecommunications blackout, is dramatically epitomic of this. The Internet shutdown that started in October 2023 goes in parallel with heavy bombing and the suspension of aid, with over 11,000 civilians killed since the beginning of Israeli bombings in October and many more injured, missing or in extremely precarious life conditions. There is no way this scale of violence and injustice can be mitigated by any words.
With the genocidal violence that characterises it, the war of Israel on Gaza is latest in a long string of attacks to Internet freedom. In its latest yearly report on the matter, Access Now recorded 187 Internet shutdowns in 35 countries, with 48 shutdowns coinciding with human rights abuses in 14 countries in 2022 alone. With its promises associated to welfare and social assistance, digital ID has been at the center of global development agendas: and at the same time, it cannot be seen in isolation from the digital rights of the people it affects. Internet shutdowns ontologically show this: denial of digital rights results in negation of the most fundamental human rights, the same that instantiations of unfair ID have illustrated. The production of injustices through unfair ID epitomises a much larger phenomenon, in which violations of rights in the digital space are further reified through IT artefacts.
Wall painting, Aida refugee camp, July 2013
In this landscape of rights’ violation and fight for redressal, a data justice perspective supports the study of complex digital ID phenomena. It was the data justice perspective that equipped the lexicon used in this blog, and that helped make sense of a literature, that on digital ID, whose sparsity across fields can be difficult to face. Different thematic foci in digital ID tend, in addition, to create islands of knowledge that do not openly communicate with to each other. This jeopardises its ability to see the impact of digital ID on people, and of voicing the perspectives lived by its users. In a world in which “doing digital ID research” is sometimes perceived as focusing on providers, the current times remind how the people’s perspective is the one that most directly and dramatically reflects digital injustice.
Living in a time when war crime jeopardises the most basic human and digital rights involves the responsibility to investigate the genesis of injustice. Discussions at the Surveillance Studies Network and the Data Justice Conference have revolved around this point, bringing to light new conceptual lenses to make sense of the phenomenon. Margie Cheesman’s concept of on infrastructural justice, conceived as the uneven benefits which sociotechnical systems instantiate, comes to mind in noting that injustice- rather than incidental – can be directly inscribed in the artefact that produce it. This questions the idea of a “dark side” of technology, presenting harm as a peripheral “side” effects: denial of human rights can be a direct product of technology design, a product which Information Systems research has a direct responsibility to engage.
The two lenses of data justice and data activism, are inseparable from each other in the narration of unfairness in digital rights. Data justice affords unpacking the dimensions of digitally-induced harm: notion of data activism illuminate routes to resistance, and the shapes it takes in an increasingly datafied world. Dimensions of data activism combine, note Milan and Van der Velden (2016), proactive and reactive components: while reactive data activism defines as ““tactics of resistance to massive data collection”. proactive data activism illuminates data advocacy, opening routes to investigate resistance enacted by the same digital tools that perpetrate oppression. The epistemic power of data activism is especially needed at these times of violence.
In a world where digital tools are plied to violence, and on its blind perpetration over civilians, the power of anti-injustice artefacts provides a light of hope in building a road to freedom. Combating digital injustice means taking stock of harm, but also of the light of resistance that communities across the world have enacted. It is in this space that data justice and data activism, as epistemic tools for direly needed research, are inseparably interlocked.
Unfair ID 