Paper Info
Title
Electronic identity services as sociotechnical and political-economic constructs:
Abstract
Electronic identification services (eIDs) have become strategic services in the global governance of online societies. In this article, we argue that eIDs are sociotechnical constructs that also have political-economic dimensions. In the European context, governmental and corporate efforts to develop eIDs are shaped by legal EU frameworks, which are almost exclusively focussed on technical and legal interoperability, such as the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA). Public concerns such as privacy, security, user empowerment and control over one's personal information prompts developers to propose a decentralized, attribute-based system governed on a nonprofit, nonstate basis (DAN-eID). To illustrate our argument, we explore a single emerging eID system (IRMA; acronym for I Reveal My Attributes) that is developing in a national context (The Netherlands). We argue that developing eIDs requires more than engineering ingenuity and legal compliance; as sociotechnical and political-economic constructs, they involve negotiation of conflicting social and political values.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1177/1461444819872537
NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Attribute-based systems,decentralized digital systems,digital societies,electronic identification systems,identity management
Journal
22.0
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
5
1461-4448
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
José van Dijck100.34
B. Jacobs21046100.09