Margie Cheesman, digital anthropologist, and doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, explores the subject of decentralised digital identity, what it is and what it means for marginalised populations.
The rise of big data and big tech platforms has heightened concerns about how ‘identification practices’—the ways in which people are made recognisable to institutions—enable invasions of privacy, state surveillance, and the extraction and exploitation of personal data by businesses for profit. Recent debates focus on the handling of health information and vaccine passports by governments and their corporate partners, but the examples are legion.
