Identification, until recently, was a transactional matter. A document was presented; a person was matched against it; the transaction proceeded. Outside such moments, a person was, for most practical purposes, unidentified. They walked, ate, attended, returned, without being recognised by any system.

This is changing. Identification is becoming, in many settings, a continuous condition. Recognition systems in public spaces match a face against held records; payment systems retain the geometry of a face; access systems integrate identification with the use of a space; entertainment, retail, and travel systems increasingly assume that the person is identified throughout their interaction rather than at its boundaries.

The effect on the ordinary events of a life is gradual but cumulative. A meal that was, in a previous era, simply a meal becomes a record of presence at a particular establishment with a particular companion. A visit to a building becomes a timestamped record. A passage through a public space becomes one more entry in a log that, in aggregate, describes a person's pattern of life.

Most of this material is held by the systems themselves rather than published. The exposure is not, in the first instance, to the general public. It is to the parties whose systems have collected the records and to the parties they share with. The picture they hold is more detailed than any picture the principal would have permitted ten years ago.

The work in this category, increasingly, is about understanding which systems are doing what kind of recognition, in which settings, and which records can be opted out of, restricted, or otherwise considered. It is not about avoiding identification, which is becoming impractical. It is about the deliberate management of a condition that, twenty years ago, was a series of moments and is now a continuous one.