342 R. Vecellio Segate processes as they arise (World Bank Group 2017, 27).15 In this sense, a State’s “advantage of backwardness”16 might be key not only to first-time implement machines with the newest standards, but to test systems that could be comfortably made compatible with potential new standards immediately after. Updates should also be universally easy to access by end-users themselves, without linked mobile phones and other accounts that might change over time and place or expire; also, the availability of SIM cards, in the absence of ID documents, cannot be taken for granted, as demonstrated for instance by discriminatory policies against the Rohingya (Martin and Taylor 2021, 59). The token should be independent from any other device or service, and where it serves as the only, exclusive way to access services, it should provide for immediate assistance in the event of technical issues, such assistance (at least upon initial automated steps) being offered by readily available humans as opposed to robotic chatbots – not even anthropomorphic AI systems are going to be trusted (Zhang et al. 2023), or should be trusted (Vecellio Segate and Daly 2023, 11), especially where “functional literacy” and scholarly levels are sub-average. The linking of several public and private services into one single app or platform is deemed problematic by e.g. Aadhaar users (Krishna 2021; Thaker 2018), but immediate reaction by humans and the unlinking of the token from third devices should ease some of these concerns. Residual worries will be deep-seated in privacy violations, and for good reasons (Vecellio Segate 2022c, 335–336). Whatever the technology solution, technical standards should define what information to capture, hide, transfer, display, and store in each circumstance, depending on the authorities’ trustworthiness and role, as well as on the applicable “soft” and “hard” laws – some of which have been discussed in this paper. There is no need to conceive for identities that are either fully displayed or fully concealed; far more efficient (and legally compliant) would be to devise concrete situations where certain pieces of information are displayed, captured, stored, and transferred, whereby others are ignored or kept hidden. What I am suggesting is to build on already existing situational frameworks17 and “specify” them for catering to the “borderline” situations I have being illustrating in the present work. This is also in 15 This means more generally that in fast-paced regulatory fields, technology solutions are to be provided under an understanding of the relevant policy trends, in order to accommodate probable forthcoming enhanced regulatory requirements without the need to drastically reset the solutions themselves. Narrow or legalistic compliance should be thus discarded, to favour “optimal” or “teleological” compliance whenever possible, and anticipate this way more demanding requirements as they may plausibly arise in the close future. 16 On this concept in contexts of public-private technology deployment and rollout, see (Vu and Asongu 2020). 17 Refer for instance to the “Sarah at the nightclub” example within (UK Department for Science, Innovation & Technology 2023).