Review ID: CBB005622293

Review of "How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person" (2021)

unapi

Colin Koopman’s How We Became Our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person offers a lineage of the ways in which institutions in the public and private sectors began classifying persons as collections of data points. Koopman describes the emergence of a new “informational person”—accompanied by a new form of power—in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. This genealogy can shed light on the diverse ways in which global regimes of data are now intervening in our lives.Take an example not examined in the book: a large-scale datafication project in India. Beginning in 2009, the government of India began to roll out, at first voluntarily, a system known as “Unique Identity” (UID). Colloquially referred to as “Aadhaar” (foundation or base), the system consists of a twelve-digit identification number linked to a database containing biometric information, such as iris scans, fingerprints, and photographs. Currently documenting over 1.2 billion individuals, Aadhaar is the world’s largest biometric identification system (see uidai.gov.in).

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