Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology ... - The ICHRP

Identity is therefore unitary and authoritative. “The aim of identity mechanisms is to be
able to link or tie a single identity to a single individual. Additional identities on top of
this ‘true’ identity are constructed as criminal or at the very least suspicious... There is
no recognition in government discourse that there could be personal preferences for
multiple or overlapping identities without malign intent.” 99 Pseudonyms are suspect.
Identities are considered valuable. “[Y]our identity is one of your most valuable assets”
because it provides access to numerous services and institutions. 100 It is also easily stolen,
being (in an echo of the “dividual”) something somehow separable from the individual
to whom it “properly belongs”. 101 It is vulnerable and must be regularly checked and
monitored through “trusted institutions”. As a result, paradoxically, individuals become
dependent on organisations both to assign and protect their personal identities.
Identity is expansive, in that it includes all manner of information about the person.
At the same time it is shallow, reduced only to those aspects of the person that lend
themselves easily and quickly to measurement and monitoring. It becomes a form of
password that determines access to numerous sites and services. This is precisely why
it is valuable to criminals.
Identity is expansive, in that it includes all manner of information about the
person. At the same time it is shallow, reduced only to those aspects of the
person that lend themselves easily and quickly to measurement and monitoring.
And here’s the rub: “Because identity is behaviourally ascribed through relations with
institutions”, Wills observes, “the individual is placed in the impossible situation of having to
police their personal data in an environment when much of that data is out of their control”. 102
This unitary, univocal, authoritative, expansive yet shallow and vulnerable identity is not
merely a creature of the state. Many private operators have insisted on just such a
notion, and social networking sites increasingly do so too. It may be that the more we
are required to accept the identity adopted in each of these fora, and reproduce it
consistently in each one, the more it acquires its own reality.
Wills identifies several alternative conceptions of identity that have been “overcoded” and so
rendered suspicious or unavailable by the prevailing notion. It suffices to list them here: 103
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▪
▪
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plural identities;
polyvocality;
anonymity;
hybridity;
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an internal (Cartesian) sense of identity (self-transparency, individuality, selfcreation);
99 Wills (2009), 11, citing a 2002 Cabinet Office study of “identity fraud”.
100 Wills (2009), 13.
101 Wills (2009), 14.
102 Wills (2009), 17.
103 Wills (2009), 21–22.
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