No Digital Public Infrastructure Without Redress
Digital public infrastructure (DPI) has become the organizing concept for national digital transformation. Across more than thirty countries, governments are now building interoperable systems for digital identity, instant payments, data exchange, and more. These systems are designed for scale: high-volume, low-friction, population-wide use.
But scale changes risk. When millions of transactions move in an instant, errors multiply instantly. When identity systems authenticate access to services, mistakes can exclude people from healthcare, banking, or welfare. When data flows across institutions, consent disputes and misuse follow. And when payments become real-time and irrevocable, scams and fraud can proliferate.
For instance, India’s Unified Payments Interface (UPI) and Brazil’s Pix have both grown at extraordinary rates. Both have also seen rising fraud complaints and scam losses. The lesson is not that DPI is flawed: it is that frictionless infrastructure generates disputes at scale.
The question is no longer whether DPI systems will produce grievances. It is whether governments will build systems capable of resolving them. Trust at scale requires redress at scale.
Related Knowledge Center: Digital privacy and data security
If you’re online, you’re generating a constant stream of information about yourself — sometimes voluntarily, sometimes unwittingly — that is assembled and used to craft your online experience. And generate wealth for data brokers. Meanwhile, designers and managers of the digital infrastructure on which the world depends are engaged in a never-ending effort to thwart attempts, by both criminal enterprises and state actors, to exploit vulnerabilities in those systems.
Signalgate | State surveillance