Big tech firms are racing to track climate refugees
To be an undocumented refugee, these days, is to exist in many places and to not exist at all. It is to have your movements, words, and actions tracked, archived, and multiplied. It is to live between fences, tents, and databases—one new entry per doctor’s visit, per bag of rice, per canister of water. It can mean having your biometric and biographical data scanned, stored, and cross-checked by people you do not know, and who speak a language you may not understand. It is to have your identity multiplied, classified, and reduced to lines of code. It is to live in spreadsheets.
Today, around 1.1 billion people live without a recognized form of identification. In many cases, their papers—if they ever had papers at all—have been burned, lost, or otherwise destroyed. And the number is growing every day. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN’s refugee agency, estimates that in 2017, one person became displaced every two seconds as a result of conflict, economics, or climate change. “In short, the world had almost as many forcibly displaced people in 2017 as the population of Thailand,” the agency reports. “Across all countries, one in every 110 persons is someone displaced.”
Each year, an average of 24 million people are displaced because of extreme climatic events, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. By 2050, the World Bank predicts, over 143 million people across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America will become climate refugees. Perhaps some of them will be lucky enough to save their passports, national identification cards, health and education records from destruction. But those pieces of paper may not mean anything wherever they end up. How will they prove who they are?
Technology already provides a multitude of ways to track displaced people as they make their journeys. As they go from stop to stop, people move through a constellation of “digital passages.” They leave behind traces of their identities—fingerprints, names, e-mails, passwords, ages—not just at international borders but also at Wi-Fi hot spots, at charging stations, and in mobile apps. These trails bring refugees into close contact with governments, NGOs, smugglers, and private companies, and create a massive exchange of identification and location data. At the same time, algorithms are being used to predict when people are most likely to become climate refugees, how they will evacuate, and where they will go.
The next frontier, though, is not figuring out where people have been or where they will settle: it is figuring out who they will be when they get there. What will their “digital identity” look like? Who will hold the keys? A number of new and established tech companies are rushing to answer these critical questions. Technology accelerated the global identity crisis, and now technology claims to have the solution.
“Digital identity” is actually a very old concept and used by governments of all persuasions. Its primitive forms include IP addresses, e-mails, and usernames; digital identity has always been both ubiquitous and anarchic (who hasn’t lost a username and password, or forgotten them entirely?).
But now that so much of our economic and political life takes place online, creating new forms of identity has taken on a severe urgency. Both the private and public sectors are racing to come up with a sustainable way of counting, identifying, and connecting not only the growing population of the global displaced, but also the wealthy population of the voluntarily mobile. Mastercard, Microsoft, Apple, Palantir, and Facebook have all entered the field, through private ventures as well as controversial partnerships with some of the world’s largest humanitarian agencies.
In 2015, all the UN’s member states committed to providing “legal identity for all” by 2030 as part of its Sustainable Development Goals.
