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As governments around the world step up to regulate artificial intelligence and biometrics, a different class of technology aims to disrupt digital identity: digital wallets. Digital wallets are electronic methods of storing, managing, and exchanging money and/or identity credentials, often through the use of mobile phones. In 2021, the European Commission set out plans to make a digital identity wallet available to all European citizens by 2024. Humanitarian organizations are also turning to decentralized wallets, partly as an alternative to increasingly controversial centralized biometric systems.
This project, supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation, explores the implications of migrants’ identification needs for digital identity policy and technical innovation. It asks:
- Can digital wallets support the needs of migrants (forced and voluntary) across their journeys and through the various identification “touchpoints” they encounter?
- What considerations should inform the design of digital identity wallets and other identity innovations to best meet the needs of forced and voluntary migrants as well as other vulnerable populations?
- Many wallets aimed at refugees offer “functional identities,” but not “foundational” ones—are the needs of displaced populations adequately served by these functional identities?
- Migrants, particularly if irregular, sometimes seek to hide their identities. Can tools such as digital wallets adequately address this need or desire for invisibility?
- Why are many state-led and private sector digital identity systems unable to accommodate migrants and non-citizens?
- How can the experiences of migrants help us make identity innovations, like digital wallets, more inclusive for everyone, including marginalized citizens?
This project is hosted at Caribou and led by a research collective that consists of Project Lead Dr. Emrys Schoemaker (Senior Research Director at Caribou) and Co-Project Leads Dr. Aaron Martin (Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Data Science, University of Virginia), Dr. Keren Weitzberg (Senior Lecturer and IHSS Fellow at the School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary University of London), and Dr. Margie Cheesman (Lecturer in Digital Economy, Kings College London).
