Electronic identity services as sociotechnical and political-economic constructs

Abstract

Electronic identification services (eIDs) have become strategic services in the global governance of online societies. In this article, we argue that eIDs are sociotechnical constructs that also have political-economic dimensions. In the European context, governmental and corporate efforts to develop eIDs are shaped by legal EU frameworks, which are almost exclusively focussed on technical and legal interoperability, such as the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the European Interoperability Reference Architecture (EIRA). Public concerns such as privacy, security, user empowerment and control over one’s personal information prompts developers to propose a decentralized, attribute-based system governed on a nonprofit, nonstate basis (DAN-eID). To illustrate our argument, we explore a single emerging eID system (IRMA; acronym for I Reveal My Attributes) that is developing in a national context (The Netherlands). We argue that developing eIDs requires more than engineering ingenuity and legal compliance; as sociotechnical and political-economic constructs, they involve negotiation of conflicting social and political values.