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This repository was archived by the owner on Aug 11, 2025. It is now read-only.
Jevons Paradox is an economic principle which introduces the concept that availability and efficiency of providing a resource (in this case data from a driver's license) can often times lead to increased consumption of the resource. This spec should be addressing whether this additional consumption provides an overall net positive gain for the web platform or if this will cause further harm to marginalized communities of people.
While many people may consider this a given of any web api, in the specific case of a driver's license we're increasing access to sensitive PII in a verified way about a user. This raises ethical questions which may be in violation of the ethical web principles and privacy principles defined by TAG. Therefore it begs the question to what degree should the web platform be contributing to this phenomena and should this API be standardized in the first place?
More specifically, I think we need to specifically address what societal impact this additional API will bring to the further marginalization of vulnerable communities and whether the acceptance of this API into the web platform is worth the tradeoffs for those additional harms. By increasing access to sensitive, verified PII we're inadvertently also making it easier to justify the requirement of providing this data in order to access specific web services. While in some cases, many would consider this acceptable such as lawmakers in Louisiana[1] it will also introduce a slippery slope where many web services will request this data from a user in a way that stretches the boundary of "legitimate usage" of data. I'm sure we can all think of many more dystopic use cases that could be introduced because of the increased access to this data. For example, I'm sure there will be at least one government that contemplates requiring all users to provide this information to social networks so they can subpoena dissenting voices on social networks like Twitter and surveil or silence them because of this required deanonymization. Is that direction we're prepared to take the web in by introducing this API?
Jevons Paradox is an economic principle which introduces the concept that availability and efficiency of providing a resource (in this case data from a driver's license) can often times lead to increased consumption of the resource. This spec should be addressing whether this additional consumption provides an overall net positive gain for the web platform or if this will cause further harm to marginalized communities of people.
While many people may consider this a given of any web api, in the specific case of a driver's license we're increasing access to sensitive PII in a verified way about a user. This raises ethical questions which may be in violation of the ethical web principles and privacy principles defined by TAG. Therefore it begs the question to what degree should the web platform be contributing to this phenomena and should this API be standardized in the first place?
More specifically, I think we need to specifically address what societal impact this additional API will bring to the further marginalization of vulnerable communities and whether the acceptance of this API into the web platform is worth the tradeoffs for those additional harms. By increasing access to sensitive, verified PII we're inadvertently also making it easier to justify the requirement of providing this data in order to access specific web services. While in some cases, many would consider this acceptable such as lawmakers in Louisiana[1] it will also introduce a slippery slope where many web services will request this data from a user in a way that stretches the boundary of "legitimate usage" of data. I'm sure we can all think of many more dystopic use cases that could be introduced because of the increased access to this data. For example, I'm sure there will be at least one government that contemplates requiring all users to provide this information to social networks so they can subpoena dissenting voices on social networks like Twitter and surveil or silence them because of this required deanonymization. Is that direction we're prepared to take the web in by introducing this API?