Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance (theslowburningfuse.wordpress.com)

Governments and corporations worldwide are rapidly replacing paper identity with biometric scans, algorithmic verification, QR codes and unified digital wallets—promoted as efficiency and inclusion but increasingly functioning as tools of surveillance and exclusion. Large-scale projects like India’s Aadhaar (biometric fingerprints) and the EU’s proposed digital identity wallet sit alongside global initiatives such as ID2020, backed by Microsoft, Accenture and Mastercard. These systems gate access to essentials—welfare, healthcare, banking, work and travel—so that an algorithmic match (or mismatch) can determine whether someone eats, gets paid, or crosses a border. Real-world failures—Aadhaar’s fingerprint non-matches that left people excluded from rations—illustrate how biometric false negatives/positives have immediate, sometimes lethal, consequences. For the AI/ML community the implications are acute: digital ID centralizes massive, continually generated personal datasets that feed surveillance capitalism and train models whose decisions directly regulate lives. Technical risks include biased biometric models that marginalize poor, elderly or manual-labor populations; opaque decision thresholds that deny services without recourse; expanded attack surfaces and single points of failure; and monetization of identity data by private vendors. These systems also create dangerous feedback loops—data-driven enforcement of labor precarity and migration control—making robustness, auditability, consent-aware data governance, fallback mechanisms and community-centered resistance urgent priorities for researchers, deployers, and policymakers.