But this approach also creates substantial risks for data protection and privacy, and may simply enable surveillance while providing no access to rights.18 Moreover, as the Aadhaar experiment has shown, if registration is sufficient to provide entitlement to certain benefits, it will swiftly become a proxy for recognition of citizenship.19 Proof of legal status National identification registers in a majority of countries (especially in the civil law tradition) record a person’s legal status in the country, including nationality or other legal residence status. The majority of new digital identification systems have maintained this model (with or without a parallel digital layer), meaning that the question of proof of nationality and legal status are central to the registration process. If this is the case, then the status recorded in the register determines the impact of the identification system on “inclusivity” in practice. If states are no longer willing to accept locally issued functional ID documents for access to services, there is no shortcut that avoids the need, during a rollout of a new identification system, to determine the status of those whose status is currently uncertain. Mis-registration can cause serious harms, even if legal residence is still supported.20 Systems needed to determine the legal status of undocumented persons How, then, to develop an ID system that would be “inclusive” for stateless people and those at risk of statelessness (because of perceptions of foreignness) in more than the most limited (and in practice exclusionary) way? Identify and issue identity documents to stateless people One approach could be to issue identity documents with the status of stateless person (or some other status that is not that of a national, but that does confirm legal residence and provide access to some rights and services).21 At first sight, this approach is logical. It is, after all, the system established for refugees, and there are contemporary efforts to integrate 18 19 20 21 Masiero, Unfair ID. Masiero and Shakthi, “Grappling with Aadhaar”; Jha and Chakrabarty, “The Production of a ‘Digital Citizen.’” Weitzberg, “Keeping People out of Camps.” Manby, Identification in the Context of Forced Displacement: Identification for Development. Statelessness and digital identity 8