326 R. Vecellio Segate occurred a few times already, how could asylum seekers trust this process, and particularly that States will not attempt at forcedly gathering or misappropriating information databases possessed by the UNHCR (not least under the guise of prosecutorial investigations arranged ad hoc)? In fact, even after asylum seekers’ claims are approved and they are granted refugee status in their new country, States of origin will hardly fail to put pressure on international organisations (IOs) to disclose refugees’ data, for either persecutory or, more neutrally, statistical purposes: state administrations retain a granular interest in knowing exactly who fled and why, and they are going to petition the UNHCR and similar organisations to release such data. Providing States of origin with refugees’ identity data would, however, defeat the very purpose of international refugee law, as a global system of last-resort protection for individuals who are persecuted (or perceive themselves to be at risk of persecution) in their original country of citizenship and/or habitual residence. The UNHCR has been sharing asylum seekers’ data with the potential host State for decades, without any consent from these individuals nor any mitigation framework in place; for instance, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS 2019, 14) notes that DHS and UNHCR have been indirectly sharing biographic information during the refugee resettlement process for many years. The MOU between DHS and UNHCR for Refugees on the Sharing of Personal Data expands that information sharing to include biometrics.8 What this means is that their data has been shared without consent, but also without a number of safeguards related to, for instance, cybersecurity. No technical standards applied mandatorily to these data transfers, nor were the transfers themselves recorded anywhere public. As if this were not serious enough, in several instances the UNHCR (and similar agencies) has been succumbing to political pressure to share data with persecuting governments from the States of origin, too – not least during the infamous Rohingya crisis (Holloway and Lough 2021; Human Rights Watch 2021; Rahman 2021). This is a blatant violation of international law, and exposes the need to design identity onboarding procedures that build on solid laws and equally solid technical standards enabling their meaningful enforcement – especially when Stateparticipated IOs are involved. Distributed ledgers and open registries are warranted, to ensure that not only IOs refrain from disclosing this data directly, but that host States do not attempt at doing so themselves with authorities in sending countries, at a later stage. This happens frequently owing to “diplomatic comity” but also in the hope to stop migrations ab initio – which, again, defeats the very purpose of having an international legal framework for asylum seekers. Sharing UNHCR aggregate data, instead, raises in principle no legal issue, and it might support political science researchers (e.g. Marbach 2018) – though again, the extent to which “aggregate” data 8 Emphasis removed.