trust and stratify

Imagine waking up one day to another you. Instead of a physical clone, though, the new you is a digital doppelganger who has taken control of your credit card and locked you out of all of your accounts. While the experience of identity theft may feel stranger than fiction, for the millions of Americans who have their identities stolen each year, the consequences are all too real. Chief among these consequences is the economic insecurity that comes from having one’s personal data compromised. As a new study by sociologist Jordan Brensinger demonstrates, this insecurity makes an individual-level financial crisis a sociological one, too.

Published in the American Sociological Review, Bren­singer’s article argues that the experience of economic insecurity from identity theft is shaped by breaches in trust across three levels of social life. These include interpersonal trust breaches between individuals and other members of their social networks, like friends and family; organizational trust breaches between individuals and responsible institutions, like banks and businesses; and systemic breaches between individuals and social structures, like class and race.The experience of economic insecurity from identity theft is shaped by breaches in trust across three levels of social life.

By using this framework in a qualitative analysis of the identity theft resolution process, Brensinger finds that, in the wake of a personal data breach, victims describe identity theft as a breach in trust, but their attribution of blame is sharply patterned by race and class. Low-income people and people of color in Brensinger’s study reported feeling “taken advantage of” and tended to be suspicious of their personal networks, whereas middle-class and upper-income and White people tended to feel as though organizations had “failed” them and demanded increased institutional protections.

Brensinger’s findings suggest that the ways people interpret the experience of identity theft and how they attempt to mitigate against future risk threaten to entrench existing inequalities. By creating mistrust among the personal networks of low-income and people of color, identity theft may work to alienate these groups from the sources of informal assistance that they often rely on to navigate an economic system stacked against them. At the same time, by demanding protection from organizations, middle- and upper-class victims may force those organizations to further prioritize their needs over those of less advantaged groups.