Biometric Technology at the Borders of Citizenship 317 it practically succeed? And who is liable in the event of failure (by fraud or incompetence)? These questions are inherently political, but rest on technical grounds insofar as they adopt the lexicon of “standards” to operate technology solutions that comply with legal requirements (or expectations thereof). The complex interfaces between the introducer’s role, borderline patterns of citizenship and identity along migratory routes, and the technical embedding of compliance with norms on digital remote onboarding (if any), is the topic this paper seeks to explore and the contribution it endeavours to make. As the acquisition of people’s identities in borderline contexts is largely unregulated both domestically and internationally, particularly so far as the introducer’s role is concerned, this paper will aim at filling this policy space with meaningful recommendations. To do so, it will seek to address three interrelated research questions: (1) What should technical standards on remote digital identity onboarding ensure in borderline contexts? (2) How to ensure that the introducer’s function is enabled and supported by those standards? and (3) Why to caution against the involvement of unaccountable private actors towards the definition of the relevant policy problems and the selection of technical standards to address them? In fact, questions 1 and 3 are interrelated: no matter the needs one identifies in borderline contexts for technology solutions to address, private actors will filter (and dilute) those needs through their own interests. This matters here as technical standards, despite their public relevance for commerce and interoperability but also for legal values and concepts such as safety, dignity, or liability, are mostly drafted quantitatively (Infantino and Bussani 2023, 6) within private associations of engineers and computer scientists where democratically elected representatives and public servants are either absent or marginally incisive (Andersdotter and Olejnik 2021; Büthe and Mattli 2011). In terms of privacy, for instance, technical standardisation contributes to a privatised, US-centred institutionalisation of “outcomes by design” that turn ‘the meaning of privacy from a public and political issue enacted by judges, lawyers, and activists into a more technocratic’ exercise (Rommetveit and van Dijk 2022, 858) that is later transplanted into preemptive regulation without having qualitatively surveyed the relevant priorities and aspirations through democratically accountable, bottom-up participatory, context-informed, and user-sensitive regulatory channels. This socio-legal work stands at the intersection of human security studies and international refugee law (or international human rights law more broadly). As for international security scholars, they have almost completely neglected discussions around technical standards and biometrics in contexts of borderline citizenship; when hints are made at these issues, it is from a broad criminological and anthropological perspective (e.g. Scheel 2019; Singler 2021; Tazzioli 2023) that certainly illuminates profound questions on human nature and institutional design, including group surveillance and algorithmic scrutiny as a form of political violence (Vecellio