
range of potential threats (e.g., data leak) and harms
(e.g., discrimination) (Hernández, 2024). For exam-
ple, in January 2018, the world’s biggest ID database
was breached, exposing the identities and biomet-
ric information of more than 1 billion Indian citi-
zens (World Economic Forum, 2019). As a conse-
quence, NDIDs’ increased adoption is just as signifi-
cant as the controversies that they have raised (Center
for Human Rights and Global Justice (NYU), 2022).
The role of stakeholders is an important consider-
ation that is too often disregarded in the NDIDs dis-
course. Individual users, service providers, institu-
tions, and the general public are all to some extent af-
fected by NDIDs. A comprehensive Harms Modeling
strategy involving all stakeholders is essential to avoid
incomplete impact assessments. Without broad rep-
resentation, harms can extend beyond data breaches,
affecting societal institutions, reinforcing power im-
balances, and intensifying existing disparities. For
example, marginalized communities may be subject
to disproportionate surveillance or biased profiling as
a result of system design flaws or even underlying in-
stitutional biases (The Institute on Stalessness and In-
clusion, 2020).
To the best of our knowledge, the current litera-
ture presents the following gaps: (i) There is no com-
prehensive survey of NDID-related harms around the
world. (ii) Most existing studies only focus on NDID-
related harms caused by technological flaws, and lim-
ited attention is instead given to the suboptimal insti-
tutional infrastructures that enable them. (iii) There
is a lack of analysis of the causes of each harm. (iv)
There is no framework other than Microsoft’s (Mi-
crosoft Corporation, 2022) for harm assessment of
emerging technologies, and even in Microsoft’s case,
its limitations lead to underrepresentation of all im-
pacted stakeholders and inaccurate assessment of po-
tential harm.
To address these gaps, this paper extends Mi-
crosoft’s Harms Modeling (Microsoft Corporation,
2022) with a detailed qualitative analysis of the roots
of harms related to NDIDs. It introduces a more ac-
curate, NDID-focused harm measurement model that
helps anticipate potential harms and captures both di-
rect and indirect harm to General End Users. Our
research provides actionable insights for harm-aware
policymaking and assessment of NDID-enabled harm
potential in emerging technology solutions. In sum-
mary, the paper provides two main contributions:
• A survey and analysis of the harms related to
NDIDs, which also allows us to broaden the list
of affected stakeholders and analyze the root of
each harm.
• Extend Microsoft’s Harms Modeling methodol-
ogy by integrating the extended list of new harms
and stakeholders and the root of each harm, which
provides actionable insights for assessing NDID
infrastructures.
2 BACKGROUND
To make the paper self-contained, we briefly cover
the main notions underlying IdMs, NDIDs, Harms,
Threats, and Microsoft’s Harms Modeling.
2.1 Identity Management Systems
IdMs offer identification and authentication services,
provide users with a digital identity, and allow them to
access their remote resources online. IdMs may create
large and complex infrastructures in which a number
of services (RPs) rely on the digital identity issued by
identity providers (IdPs), which in turn enroll and au-
thenticate users. In this context, NDIDs represent a
special case of IdMs that is designed to access gov-
ernmental resources. In this paper, we consider both
centralized and decentralized IdMs. In decentralized
systems, IdPs are referred to as Issuers, and RPs are
called Verifiers. Given the wider audience of NDIDs
and the sensitivity of the data and resources they han-
dle, they need to ensure a high security and privacy
profile for all users. We refer to the extended set of
NDID users as General End Users, which include all
people impacted by the deployment of NDIDs, in-
cluding indirect users (for example, the children of
parents who are denied medical assistance (Center for
Human Rights and Global Justice (NYU), 2021) or
access to welfare programs (Sawhney et al., 2021) as
a result of NDID-related harms). Among General End
Users, we highlight High-Risk stakeholders: a subset
of the General End Users category considered at risk
of experiencing disproportionate harm (e.g., stateless
people) (OpenID Foundation, Elizabeth Garber and
Mark Haine (editors), 2023).
2.2 Harms Modeling and Threat
Modeling
In this paper, we focus on harms, which, despite some
similarities, differ from threats, as highlighted in Fig-
ure 1. A threat is an event with the potential to ad-
versely impact organizational operations, assets, or
individuals (Gutierrez et al., 2006). Threats occur
through attacks exploiting one or more system vulner-
abilities. Harms are events or circumstances that neg-
atively impact stakeholders directly or indirectly in-
teracting with the system that do not necessarily occur
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