Doctoral Dissertation Research: Identity Theft Remediation and the Production of Economic Insecurity

身份盗窃通常被认为是美国增长最快和最紧迫的金融犯罪之一。它每年影响数百万美国人，并导致数百亿美元的企业和消费者的经济损失。许多受害者还报告了负面的情绪和身体影响，并面临不准确的信用报告，意外的债务，以及金融账户，贷款或保险的拒绝。虽然先前的研究将后一种后果与解决身份盗窃的复杂步骤联系起来，但它未能解释为什么个人难以“恢复身份”。“通过深入探索这一过程，该项目将评估当代解决身份盗窃过程的有效性及其对美国家庭的影响。该项目从受害者及其所在组织的角度调查身份盗窃解决方案。通过对受害者的深入采访，它探讨了个人如何解决身份盗窃问题，并详细介绍了他们及其家人所经历的经济和情感损失。它还通过采访工作人员和观察关键组织环境中的工作，审查了参与补救过程的组织和政府机构所面临的问题和挑战。总之，这些方法将阐明如何管理个人数据有助于美国家庭的经济和其他形式的不安全，以及参与者如何协商风险和信任，以修复专家系统的故障，该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为是值得支持的，使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估。

Identity theft is often considered one of the fastest growing and most pressing financial crimes in the United States. Each year it affects millions of Americans and results in financial losses for businesses and consumers in the tens of billions of dollars. Many victims also report negative emotional and physical effects and face inaccurate credit reports, unanticipated debt, and rejection for financial accounts, loans, or insurance. While prior research links these latter consequences to the complicated steps for resolving identity theft, it fails to offer an explanation for why individuals struggle to "recover their identities." By exploring that process in depth, this project will assess the efficacy of contemporary processes for resolving identity theft and their consequences for American households.This project investigates identity theft resolution from the perspective of victims and the organizations they navigate. Through in-depth interviews with victims, it explores how individuals go about resolving identity theft and details the financial and emotional toll that experience takes on them and their families. It also examines the perceived issues and challenges facing organizations and government agencies involved in the remediation process by interviewing staff and observing work in key organizational contexts. Together, these methods will elucidate how managing personal data contributes to economic and other forms of insecurity in American households, as well as how actors negotiate risk and trust to repair breakdowns in expert systems for identification-sociotechnical systems central to the generally smooth operation of countless economic and political processes in everyday life.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.