Biometric Technology at the Borders of Citizenship 345 borderline contexts, might well represent a breach of trust and originate waves of chilling effect across populations and individuals in similar conditions, who will refrain from sharing their data out of mistrust for the algorithmic readability of what sociologists of crime like Haggerty and Ericson (2003) call “data doubles” (Ruckenstein 2014). The latter are “collated” pieces of data which were supposed to be handled independently but that once read together, may provide original insights or predictive patterns about an individual’s choices and behavior; they often defeat the teleology or any confidentiality upon which data sharing with the government is customarily premised. When the whole-of-government approach within governmental departments is coupled with revolving doors between public and private appointments (and related databases and technology solutions), it is probably wise to raise some concerns in relation to data being actually processed exclusively for the purposes it was first collected, and shared or read by no other entity. The World Economic Forum (WEF) believes that biometrics gathering for digital identity should be driven by FIs worldwide, along the entire chain of service delivery, authorisation, attribute exchange, authentication, attribute collection, and standard development. They propose so under the (unreferenced) assertion that FIs would be entrusted with the highest confidence by “users” with regards to asset protection and information confidentiality (World Economic 2016, 23; 80; 89). Anybody who is familiar with the global governance of information, as well as with PIL, however, knows way too well that this is not the case. FIs are primary subjects and objects of regulatory outreach by the most powerful States, starting with the US; under the tag of inter alia “anti-money laundering”, tax agencies and several other enforcement bodies tend to assert their power extrajurisdictionally to compel identity disclosure, due diligence, and/or data handover. While this is not an issue in the absolute, it becomes so in contexts of borderline citizenship, whose actors already belong to the most vulnerable and marginalised fractions of the most fragile societies. To begin with, US corporate conglomerates have no business interest in deploying biometrics technology in the contexts described here, to the extent that if such technology’s development is wholly outsourced to them, risks are that these populations and individuals will fall outside their scope of action, or will be anyway designed with other targets in mind and thus not tailored to the specific needs being expounded here. Even if they were covered, however, they would not necessarily be so for the right reasons, but rather to demark even more pre-emptively the perimeter of those who can “access” (territories and services) from those who cannot. Individuals at the borders of citizenship are unlikely to have their financial records completely clear (or to have any at all), which might well be due to political persecution, group discrimination, fear of reprisal, intergenerational oppressions, and mistrust in institutionalised asset preservation. Second, and from a more legal governance perspective, FIs are increasingly being resorted to as an instrument of economic

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