Opportunities to Bring People into the System Using New Pieces of Evidence

The types of events that trigger documentation—which may only happen a handful of times in a property holder’s lifetime—are far from the only evidence of property rights. In fact, the reality of our property rights is evidenced by a multitude of small, everyday events: where we sleep at night, where our mail is delivered, the knowledge and memories of our neighbors, or the fact that we paid to put a new roof on our house or fence around the yard. These small events, in aggregate, form a more accurate picture of reality than is captured by the monument credentials currently used by administrative agencies.

The problem, of course, is that these everyday events have historically occurred in the analog world, outside the purview of administrative agencies that provide us with property documents. But what if we found a way to harness the evidence of these small events and use them to supplement the small number of monument credentials currently accepted by administrative agencies?

Our lives are becoming increasingly digitized. With the proliferation of smartphones, satellites, and social media platforms, more and more of these small events leave a data trail. Taken together, this data can be used to create a tapestry of new evidence—let’s call it a “tapestry credential”—that property holders could use to obtain documentation of their property rights.

To obtain property documents, claimants must provide credentials such as survey plans, identification documents, and notarized forms. The problem is that these credentials are unavailable to many people.

For example, arguably the most important credential a person can have—one that is critical to property documentation—is an identity document. According to the World Bank, however, nearly 1 billion people around the world lack legal IDs.¹ Documents, including land documents, cannot be issued to you if you can’t prove who you are.

But, of course, every person has an identity, regardless of whether that identity is documented. Furthermore, everyone has a social identity that they build through their relationships with other people. Where these interactions intersect with the digital world, they leave a record. This record may not be in an administratively recognized format, but it can be used to build evidence over time that can substitute for a traditional identity credential.

Similarly, a survey plan is not the only proof of the location of a property. Parcel boundaries can be seen from satellite imagery, and they can increasingly be corroborated through digital evidence like geotagged photographs, cell phone location data, delivery records, and the like. None of these data points are sufficient to prove property location on their own, but together they create a tapestry credential that could.

The tapestry of information generated through ordinary interactions can serve as a first step onto the credential ladder. As more and more such digital evidence is created, the ladder may become more like a ramp; gradual, continuous progress can be made as evidence accrues.

This idea is already being operationalized in the financial inclusion space, where applicants’ social history is being used to help them open bank accounts and derive alternative credit scores.²

In a sense, administrative reality as we know it has a very low resolution. This should be intuitive to anyone living in a high-tech society. The government agencies with which we interact have a few important and very well-validated pieces of information about us. But Facebook and Google possess far more data points gleaned through our daily activities in a wider variety of domains, many of which the government has no right or reason to look into. These platforms know where we go and when; they may know why and with whom. They know what we read and what we buy.

Some of this information bears directly on property rights and the credentials needed to access them. Location data is clearly in that category, as are many financial transactions, including deliveries and payment of property-related expenses like utilities and maintenance costs.

In places where property transactions occur informally, property records in the registry will quickly fall out of date while digital trails continue to capture evidence of the reality—revealing that a new person is living at the property, making upgrades to it, etc.

To give another example, in places with overlapping property rights, administrative systems often only record one or two of those rights—for example freehold ownership or long-term occupancy. This gives an incomplete picture of the occupancy and use of the land, and it also means that people with other rights to that property are locked out from administrative proof of those rights. But digital evidence can reveal other sorts of relationships, like sharecropping or seasonal occupancy.

And in places where women are still locked out of property systems, administrative records reveal only the ownership of the male head of household. Yet women make home improvement purchases, even where they have no formal property right. Operationalizing the digital trail related with these purchases promises to put women on the property map. This not only helps to solve the accuracy flaw, but also the access flaw because it provides a base of evidence for providing documents to people whose rights are not currently recognized.

And yet, there are several very real barriers to using tapestry credentials to solve the accuracy and access problems in the realm of property rights. If all of this data is to be used as evidence, then people need to be able to easily collect and share the data they generate, and administrators must be able to trust it.

From the administrative perspective, several things must be known in order to trust the data. An administrator must be able to establish who created the data, who is presenting it, and if the person presenting it is the person the data is about.

Under the current monument credential model, data is trusted because it is created by trusted parties. The location and boundaries of a property, for example, are established by a surveyor whose job is to supply reliable information. The identity of a person signing off on a property transfer is verified by a notary, who endorses the signed document with a stamp.

The tapestry credential paradigm aims to move away from this model by admitting evidence produced by the widest possible number of interactions, the vast majority of which will not involve a person trusted by the registry, like a surveyor or notary. This requires a new way of thinking about trust.

If location data is generated by a mobile phone, how do you know who owns that phone? How do you know that the owner was the one using it at the time the data was generated? If a message is posted on a social media account, how do you know who controls it?

The events that generate this data involve multiple parties (even if, on their face, interactions like text messages and mobile money transfers appear to only involve two). As people build their social identities through digital communication tools, their interactions are intermediated by networked computers—sensors that keep a record of events in the form of data. In order to establish the origin of that data, the parties in these interactions must be identified.