Identities Project – Episode 2
Aritcle 1 – ID Systems Fail Because Their Designers Have a Blind Spot: the User
We’re living through a new wave of identity fever in the development sector, with systems like Aadhaar proposed as the panacea for all kinds of problems, including national security and economic development, identity fraud and improving access to government services.
But the most important issue here isn’t one that only affects Aadhaar—this is about the negotiation between designers and users that affects every identity system, anywhere in the world, from India to Nigeria, Afghanistan to the United States.
As Caribou Digital’s Emrys Schoemaker argues:
“It’s not about designing a technology better, or figuring out what’s going to make a problem easier to manage from the perspective of the designer. It’s that, if you start thinking how users experience their everyday lives, you may not end up focusing on the same problems at all. Focusing on users can ensure that you’re focusing on the most important issues, as well as the most important technologies that might be developed in response to them.”
In her book When Old Technologies Were New, Carolyn Marvin uses the phrase “cognitive imperialism” to describe how technology pioneers project their own views of the world onto their technologies without considering the real needs of their end users. Meanwhile, Wiebe Bijker’s history of the invention of Bakelite lays out the theory of the social construction of technology—a history of how the people inventing things aren’t necessarily the same people who know their true potential.
Within the technology industry, these kinds of analyses that put the needs of users ahead of what the designers assume they need are quite common, and in some cases can be very successful. But this isn’t the case in the identity technology sector. The risk for ID tech is its greater chance of ineffectiveness, as it tends toward the top-down, the centrally planned, and the bureaucratic. The momentum in today’s dialogue around identity for development either risks missing out on the user’s needs altogether or until it’s too late, as analysts like Richard Heeks have argued.
Ultimately, the success of identity systems is not binary. It’s not just about counting the numbers of adoptees and refuseniks. Our research is showing that user adoption is far more complex, nuanced, and contextual. It hinges on how the mosaics of users’ lives and needs map onto the promises of identity technologies, not on whether politicians can successfully pass legislation to impose them. It’s not about whether people adopt an ID; it’s about whether they can and do use it effectively.
Technology development is a constant tussle between the intentions and assumptions of designers and inventors, and the social contexts of the people who actually use their creations.
There are plenty of examples of this in all kinds of fields, from pedestrians carving “desire paths” through park grass to the 1980s battle between VHS and Betamax (which wasn’t settled by the porn industry backing VHS, as is commonly believed, but rather by Sony not realizing that consumers valued being able to record for longer than an hour more than picture quality). This applies just as much to the identity technology sector.
We can see that in the United Kingdom, which intended to introduce a new ID card post-9/11 as a way to improve national security; it was, however, rejected by citizens, the academic and political elite for being part of a growing “surveillance state.”
Meanwhile, everywhere else in Europe a national ID program is completely uncontroversial and trusted—go to, say, Belgium, where a similar card was launched in 2003 and had reached 100 percent adoption by 2011, and you’ll find Belgians using it for everything from reporting crime to digitally signing documents.
In Nigeria, though, the post-2007 rollout of a national identity system has been mired in controversy. The one-size-fits-all card, provided by MasterCard as a debit card and legally mandated ID for accessing services like voting, has managed to offend almost every demographic. It’s seen as a wasteful white elephant. In Afghanistan, the e-Tazkira card is largely viewed as a good idea in theory, but there’s continual controversy over what kinds of personal information (ethnic, tribal, and more) should be included on each person’s card. (This extensive report from the Afghanistan Analysts Network by Jelena Bjelica and Martine van Bijlert is well worth your time if you’d like to know more.)
A new ID gains favor, or not, for a number of different reasons. But the idea of success or failure is itself also open to interpretation. For example, take a look at the curious, extraordinary example of Estonia’s e-residency, launched in December 2014 and available to non-Estonians for €50, a photograph, and a copy of your fingerprints. It gives anyone the ability to found a company in Estonia and take advantage of the country’s world-leading digital bureaucracy, where it reportedly only takes five minutes to file a digital tax return.
There is no cultural pressure or incentive to become an Estonian e-resident. It’s a purely economic form of citizenship, and, as Dan Hill writes in Dezeen, it’s “a provocation about 21st-century citizenship.” The people who sign up for it are a globalist, entrepreneurial class who are already more likely to be citizens of more than one country. For them, an investment in one more may well seem prudent.
So far, almost 17,000 people have signed up for e-residency in Estonia, and the 1.3 million-population country wants 10 million e-residents by 2025. But will it be a success if it hits that target? Or will it be a success if it, instead, sparks a trade war in digital bureaucracy and national identity between neighboring European countries?
As we continue with each episode of this identities project, we’ll be building a map of the social mosaics that bind people together—and how their senses of identity develop out of them. Each story we share will be a corrective to thinking too much in terms of technology or policy, and remind us to look instead from the perspective of the user. Identity systems might develop from the complex interactions of the market and the state, but like all technologies, they don’t succeed unless the people they seek to represent embrace them.
Article 2 – Adopting New ID Systems Often Means New Mistakes for Users to Fix
Ishmat Begum takes a handbag off a hook on the wall of her small tenement home and lays out the rainbow of ID cards she keeps carefully tucked inside.
INTERVIEW WITH ISHMAT BEGUM (45), BENGALURU 2017
- She points to the blue one:
- If we show them this one, they give us tablets.
- She pulls out another.
- See, this is the ration card. I keep all these cards and documents right here. I arrange them all inside,
- Now, what happened three months ago is that my son’s name is different in the Aadhaar card, as compared to the ration shop.
You may remember Ishmat from the first episode of our digital identities project. In this episode, we’re back sitting with her at her sidewalk stall as she explains why, for her, a new ID card has been so frustrating. While she doesn’t know exactly how the mistake with her son’s name happened, errors like this are unsurprising when it comes to signing up millions of people to a new identity system. An ID card such as Aadhaar is supposed to make life easier for people like Ishmat—it’s the one card you need to access every government service, plus a few private ones for good measure. But, of course, for many people their interactions with Aadhaar places them in a state of flux. As the new system comes in and lives adopt to the change, the long-term benefits or disadvantages may not be the same as the short-term ones being experienced right now.
For Ishmat and her husband, the change is unnecessary. To date, they’ve been doing just fine in the informal economy, relying on the fact that people know and trust them. They depend on neighbors for financial help, rather than official moneylenders like banks or microloan organizations. And when she went to the doctor for the first time to inquire about her health problems, she wasn’t asked for ID. When her children first went to school, she says,
“There was nothing like [Aadhaar] then. It is only now that they are asking.”
Now, Ishmat says ID is requested for all kinds of things, from new SIM cards to gas cylinders. “And if there is even a small problem with our gas subscription, then immediately they ask for all details. They ask for Aadhaar card and Voter’s Card and even bank account number. If there is a single mistake in any of them, our connection itself stands canceled,” she says.
“Now everything sits on their computer with specific names and address and details. And you have 24-hour booking. Earlier it was not like this. Earlier, we just had to give our gas connection number and it would get booked. Now after the ‘hello,’ we have to give details and then they send us a message. What will unlettered people like us understand from that message?”
She gestures to a man carrying a gas cylinder, who arrives during our conversation. “That is why we call this person, and we give him our name and account number and he drops off the cylinder when he comes this way. He knows us and we know him.”
PEANUT SELLER, BENGALURU 2017
- For many people, personal trust works just fine as the basis for buying and selling things;
- introducing an ID card into the mix just makes things more complicated, not less. Take Devi, a peanut seller also from Bengaluru, whom we spoke to while he was sitting nearby on another stretch of sidewalk. He told us about how he ended up with two names.
When Devi was a child, his father accidentally registered him for school as Devi, “a feminine-sounding name,” he says. “[But] because the school refused to admit me, my father changed my name to Dhinkar. But he had not foreseen that it will be a problem in the future for a person with two names. I use both names.”
The problem, in short, is that he’s registered under the two different names in different places, for different things. His Aadhaar card is registered in Tamil Nadu; his driver’s license is from the neighboring state of Karnataka. He has bank accounts in Tamil Nadu and Bengaluru, but he’s also known and borrowed from informal moneylenders for at least 15 years. The moneylenders don’t ask for ID, but the banks give him better rates, so for that—and for all the various government services he uses, including rations—he knows he needs to try and become one person again in the eyes of the law.
Devi and Ishmat have plenty of real relationships with their local communities and economies, but the state demands that they make those relationships solid in the form of new ID cards. Devi’s right in the middle of the transition between the formal and informal economies.
“You see this temple here?” he asks, pointing to the temple just beyond his peanut stall. “So these temple people see us sitting around and they know us. Next they auction the space around the temple for people. They quote a price on this area on an annual basis. After collecting money from each of us, the temple trust people give us a little counterfoil on paper. They never ask for [ID].”
While the experience of using IDs such as Aadhaar hasn’t been a bad thing, it can complicate parts of life that were relatively easy until now. For Ishmat and her husband, who have both been suffering from serious health issues for the last five years, going to fix their son’s name mistake just isn’t an option. It would mean a lost day or more of work, and they can’t put up with waiting around in the local government offices, Bengaluru One.
“They say, ‘Get the correct name on the card, and then take [the ration],’” Ishmat told us. “Such a headache is it. Who will go to Bengaluru One and wait? Now from the past six months we have not been availing of the PDS services. I am an ailing person, madam. Where will I go to this place and that to wait for hours and get a name change and a stamp? So I have left it,” she says.
INTERVIEW WITH ISHMAT BEGUM (45), BENGALURU 2017
- Still, Ishmat doesn’t dismiss digitized record keeping as completely useless:
- See, if we had to go to [the doctor], then we would have had to wait for 12 hours or 24 hours to get the report.
- Now, you go up the stairs and get a CT scan done, and as we are even descending the stairs the report is all ready and even sent to the doctor. It is so quick. It has become easier for us.
Devi, too, is upbeat about what he’ll be able to do once his identity clash is fixed.
“It is my identity as a citizen of India to have this Aadhaar card. Yes or no?” he says. “Well, those benefits [of having a card] are for me to go and get.”
Article 3 – The Five Most Important Things We’ve Learned This Month
We’re still trying to find out whether identity documents like Aadhaar—whether adopted out of necessity or out of some anticipated benefit—make people’s lives better, or whether they’re seen as a bureaucratic necessity. That said, don’t think adopting or obtaining a card or identity instantly makes your life better; there are challenges in the process of getting one, and challenges in the process of using, storing, and interacting with one.
We know that identity—and identity artifacts—leads to changes in social relations, but what kinds of changes? Is it change for the good, or does it exploit users’ circumstances? Here are the five most notable things we’ve learned from this month’s research, in an effort to answer these questions:
1. The biggest challenge for many people is knowing what to do, where and when
We’ve heard the story of Ishmat in this and the last episode, and we’ve heard other stories where people just give up, for example, not getting a mistake fixed on a ration card. Then they’re not availing themselves of rations because it’s too much hassle, and it’s too intimidating for them to go through the bureaucratic process of fixing the mistake. In the case of Aadhaar, there are active efforts from the government to make that process easier by the Aadhaar centers (or kendras). But in other cases, it doesn’t seem that simple.
The fact that everything is moving online does have implications for lower socioeconomic demographics, because they’re the ones who might not necessarily have access to those sites or sources of information. Not knowing where to go, to whom to go, and all the blind alleys and dead ends that people end up in means they often abandon the process of fixing an ID error. We should make sure they don’t get left behind when it comes to information and knowledge of those processes.
2. People rely on others for help with forms, but the quality of that help is inconsistent
We’ve found that, whether for a bank or a particular type of ID or Aadhaar card, the application forms are long, in English, or are generally quite intimidating without offering assistance for the illiterate and semi-literate. What’s impressive, however, is how people navigate those problems by asking others for help—it may mean filling in a form, for example, or asking for help in understanding a particular section.
What can be more problematic is that sometimes the person who’s helping isn’t necessarily any better informed. So, what legitimacy does the helper have? How much are they actually giving correct information?
We’re asking questions around that, but the improvisation (or jugaad, in Hindi) with which people navigate these complicated systems is impressive.
3. Different groups have different relationships to their ID
We’ve looked at two out of our three states so far—the next state is Assam—but we’ve already found some big differences between regions. First, we’ve found many more migrant transactions in Delhi than in Bengaluru. That could, of course, just be sample bias; migrants are the ones we talked to, but it does seem like there are other factors have impact on these demographics.
There are a lot of questions around residency in Delhi, for example, have you got a rent agreement? What are the ID artifacts that are needed for that? If you have your Aadhaar card made in your home state, then it can’t be used for proof of address in Delhi, so what implications does that have and how do people deal with the challenge of showing proof of residence? That’s one difference; we find a lot more issues concerning migrants from other Indian states versus legal migrants from neighboring countries.
The other issue is around gender. In Delhi, the women we spoke to are less likely to use ID artifacts for transactions, in the sense that they’re less likely to be the ones in government offices or at points of transaction such as getting a gas collection, or getting a SIM card. Generally, if you’re a wife, a sister, or a daughter, a male partner or relative seems to do that for you. Whereas in Bengaluru and Garudahalli, our female interviewees were frequently engaging in transactions using their ID artifacts.
Rural processes seem more complex and more layered than in urban areas. If you need a land registration certificate for, say, a house loan, the processes involved are very layered. We’re not sure why yet, but the people we’re talking to in an urban context may have better, more codified processes in place compared to other respondents.
4. Privacy is a big issue—too big to grasp yet
We’d definitely disagree with any kind of comment that says “the poor don’t care about privacy” or “privacy doesn’t exist in India.” It does exist, but in different shapes and forms.
There are concerns about identity cards and privacy, and we’re trying to unpack them all. If you’re worried about your privacy being compromised and your ID card being used, is it because you’re worried about theft, or are you worried about surveillance? When someone asks for your ID, how legitimate is that request perceived if the person asking is a total stranger? What if they’re a government official, or an intermediary helping with a form?
Where does the trust come from? These worries are diverse and need unpicking, as they’re definitely changing after the introduction of artifacts like Aadhaar. We’ll be actively looking at privacy in depth for the remaining interviews.
It’s wrong to draw generalizations yet just from these conversations.
Above all, we hesitate to draw conclusions from these insights just yet—these are just examples we’ve seen. There are major regional differences, and differences of class, caste, and gender. Those are the areas we’re focusing our questions on, as well as on those who are extremely vulnerable (like pensioners), those who are visibly or mentally disabled, LGBT groups, and anybody who can definitely benefit from owning or having an ID card, but who may also face particular challenges with regard to their own identity and how it interacts with the card.
The majority of the interviewees so far are of a lower socioeconomic status. We’ve talked to respondents such as pavement sellers—those who are selling shoes or belts or perishable goods like snacks—and security guards, but we’ve also looked at slightly higher socioeconomic demographics—those with low-end smartphones, for example—and we’ve also got a handful of those who are probably more middle class respondents. We want to see if these issues are particularly because of socioeconomic demographics or whether they’re uniform across class.
But we don’t want to draw binaries for any of the people we’ve spoken to, and miss nuance in the process.
