Misidentified: Searching for Security in the Data Economy

This project investigates what happens when the systems organizations use to identify people break down. The focus is financial identity theft — an experience that affects tens of millions of Americans and exposes them to significant hardship. Drawing on over 100 interviews with victims and professionals, hundreds of hours of observation, and analysis of organizational and regulatory documents, the project shows how the identities and financial data that organizations rely on are not simply discovered but actively produced — through negotiations between technology, expert judgment, and the people those systems are meant to represent. When those negotiations go wrong, the costs fall disproportionately on consumers.