COVID-19 has hit a world in which social protection schemes are increasingly augmented with digital measures. Digital identity schemes are especially being adopted to match citizens’ data with social protection entitlements, enabling authentication through demographic and, increasingly, biometric data at the point of access. In this talk, Silvia Masiero discusses three sets of implications that COVID-19 has yielded on digital social protection, namely: legal, informational, and design-related protection schemes. She argues that these three forms have also generated data injustice causing greater exclusions during the pandemic and they will need to be monitored in the post-pandemic scenario. The talk relates to the COVID-19 from the Margins project edited with Stefania Milan and Emiliano Treré, collecting multilingual narrations from the silenced voices of the datafied pandemic.

Silvia Masiero is an Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo. The talk is part of University of Kassel’s research project Re:coding Algorithmic Cultures of the Pandemic funded by the VolkswagenStiftung. It is held online via Zoom, Meeting ID: 915 7708 2132 Passcode: 766465