ID artefacts are bearers of information. On the subject’s identity, but also on many other aspects concerning them: their entitlements, their household size, the markers to which certain entitlements are connected. As such, ID artefacts play a significantly greater role than simply affording authentication at the point of access of a given service: they tell significant parts of a person’s story, materialising or denying the opportunity to access particular entitlements. The information-bearing role of such artefacts is, to say it with the latest, great book by Mareile Kaufmann, a route to “Making Information Matter”: information on users, but also on what their demographics, citizenship status, family and socioeconomic classification mean to accessing key means to livelihood.
Work on India’s ration cards, in primis the great book “In Pursuit of Proof: A History of Identification Documents in India” by Tarangini Sriraman, has expanded on the materiality of identification documents and its consequences. Ration cards are the central document for accessing subsidised items under India’s Public Distribution System (PDS), the country’s food security system which provides subsidised foodgrains and other commodities to entitled households. Crucial to the ration card is its nature as a household-based document: moved from an individually issued form in July 1952, the card is, Sriraman notes, a reflection of the use of «family as a category of governmentality» as made by the Indian government. It is in virtue of household membership, rather than their own individuality, that people are subjects of rights in the PDS: and at the same time, it is in the materiality of the ration card that key information is contained and enacted. Pre-biometric, older forms of ration cards consisted of a paper booklet with numbered spaces, where each month, at the time of ration delivery, the ration dealer would put a physical sign or stamp indicating that the ration had been collected. This provided central information to (a) the ration dealers themselves, and (b) the users, for whom an empty space on the card constituted the material proof that a ration had not been delivered.
Paper-based receipt, Karnataka, April 2018
The transition to digital ID artefacts, moving core aspects of identification, authentication and authorisation to the digital world, may leverage digitality to strengthen the core aspects of accountability and transparency promised in the transmission of key information. At the same time, the question on which information is preserved – and which is lost – in the transition from a physical to a digital ID artefact remains open. A core example is offered by the work of Grace Carswell and Geert De Neve, who investigated the transition of India’s state of Tamil Nadu from physical ration cards to smart cards, carrying a scannable QR code to be used by people for authentication in ration shops. The smart card, note Carswell and De Neve, promises easy and secure identifiability of individuals at the point of sale: a QR code affords retrieving the person’s name, family size, and all details connected to determination of entitlement for that month. At the same time, the card promises delinking of the act of identification from the person’s fingerprint, which constitutes advantages especially for elderly people whose mobility – and ability to physically visit the ration shop – is limited. All these notes make the smart card an artefact that promises informational justice, defined as the ability of an ID artefact to reflect and enact correct information on subjects.
But the parallel story, concerning information that is lost in the transition to digital ID artefacts, may be as important as that on information that is gained. Work from Carswell and De Neve illustrates also this point. As their research on the Tamil Nadu PDS reveals, the transition to a smart card eliminated the material component of the acknowledgement of ration delivery: before it was a stamp on the ration card booklet, physically provided by the ration dealer, that provided proof of delivery, and its absence could be used as a means to prove that ration collection had not happened yet. In other words: an absent collection stamp was a tool of bargaining power. With the transition to smart cards, however, proof of delivery was delegated to a text message on the registered person’s phone: this posed problems of a gendered nature, due to ration cards often being registered in the name of a male member of the family rather than that of women. It also posed problems of accessibility, due to text messages being sent in English, and many PDS users in the state not speaking this language. But at the heart of the problem, is a transition where the bargaining power of an empty space on a ration card – physically showing that collection has not happened – being lost: users cannot show the “lack of reception” of a text message, which leaves them with no option to prove that a month’s ration delivery has not happened. This information is lost in the digital artefact, while the physical artefact, the paper booklet, was explicitly designed to carry it.
In my forthcoming book Unfair ID, I propose the notion of information-erasing artefacts to conceptualise the loss of information that transition from physical to digital forms of ID can involve. The transition to smart cards in the PDS is a poignant example: another one is in the work of Margie Cheesman, who studied a blockchain-based digital wallet offered to women refugees in a cash-for-work programme in Jordan. Women refugees, Cheesman notes, used to receive an envelope containing the cash corresponding to worked days and hours: his made it possible for them to be sure of the exact correspondence of salaries to the worked time, as well as ensuring actual usability of the cash. But the transition to the blockchain-powered, biometrically enabled EyePay machines introduced informational hurdles that were not present before: recognition of the user through iris-based matching produced a paper receipt, reporting only some of the key information needed. The receipts, refugees reported to Cheesman, did not report what each payment was for, and neither how many and which working days the payment corresponded to: they only enabled the user to collect money from a cash counter, at the same time not knowing which days’ salary payment was being collected. The issue, Cheesman continues, transposes to the material usability of cash, which stands in stark contract with the “balance” held in a digital wallet: paper receipts, she notes, were held securely to preserve their materiality, with women folding receipts into their bras during the working day to prevent the ink from rubbing off.
The transition to smart ration cards in a large food security programme, as well as that to a blockchain-powered digital wallet in a cash-for-work scheme, induce thinking on a type of information loss that a transition to digitality – with its aims of transparency and accountability – does not necessarily contemplate. Against this backdrop, I find the idea of information-erasing artefacts a powerful one to conceptualise this type of informational loss. It is not, I argue in the book, only unintended loss: it is meaningful erasure, a point that the information-deficient receipts described in Cheesman’s work bring to material visibility. The informational advantages of digitality need attention, as it is proven for instance by electronic weighing machines in India’s PDS: electronic weighing of goods visualises quantities sold, and reduces the scope for manipulation at the last mile of large food security programmes. But to be complete, the story of informational justice in digital ID needs theoretical tools to conceptualise erasure, and that is where the idea of information-erasing artefacts can be of some use. More work is needed on the informational consequences of such a game-changing transition.
Unfair ID 