Digital ID as surreptitious experimentation in the humanitarian-tech industry: an ethnography of a biometric pilot in a refugee camp in the Thailand-Myanmar border

Abstract

This article focuses on a technological pilot involving a digital identity system that was introduced in the hospital of a refugee camp along the Thailand-Myanmar border. Drawing on an 18-month-long ethnographic study of refugees’ experiences with biometric systems, the article analyses the pilot as an example of ‘surreptitious experimentation’. Surreptitious experimentation is symptomatic of the wider commercialisation and digital infrastructuring of the humanitarian space, which we make sense of through the term ‘humanitarian-tech industry’. This is a mixed methods study involving semi-structured and group interviews, participatory art sessions and ethnography. In total, we spoke with 174 refugees and 27 expert participants involved in the aid operations. The research found that the digital ID system was implemented despite local misgivings. The term ‘surreptitious’ illustrates the fact that the new system was not announced as a ‘pilot’, but rather simply rolled out to replace existing forms of patient registration. Because the pilot took place in the infrastructural background, it remained hidden. The article documents the lack of local understanding and meaningful consent among refugees. The promise of ‘self-sovereign’ decentralised identity advocated by the pilot sponsors was never communicated to the local communities, let alone ever realised, even when a need for data portability emerged. Instead, the article observes that the pilot introduced harms and amplified the asymmetries which already exist in humanitarian and particularly medical humanitarian settings. As an exemplar of surreptitious experimentation, the digital ID pilot reworked and revitalised the colonial logics of aid.