Identity tech marketing people go on about it extends franchise to people for public services, and solves the problem of the "unbanked," which should return results in greater social equity. There is a large social justice aspect to it, where people engaged in distributing benefits need to know who to give them to.

Of course, the criticism of this is that is what borders are for, where citizens are presumably equal within them, and detailed identity attributes for benefits and equity is a recipe for facilitating totalitarian urges. This gets very political very quickly.

Identity is an ancient problem. Like old testament ancient problem where even back then numbering people allegedly gets you plagues. (presumably because when you get lots of people together and living longer, that's what happens)

Digital identity tech is a fascinating, difficult problem that is a proxy for governance in general. Vendors would prefer not to freight their products with that, but it's really the ur-problem.

I think that advancing technological capabilities will eventually make it impossible to participate in "the system" (National, Global, whatever) without being subject to a pervasive surveillance (which is already happening.) So we will be forced into some sort of totalitarian system whether we like it or not by our own technology. So to me it seems like the real question is what kind of totalist system should be build?

To be sure we are confronting these questions already (cf. the Ashley Madison data breach and how it stirred up, uh, conversation around extramarital affairs.)