| Sumario: | Asylum decision-making is a complicated process. The vast ethnographic scholarship on refugee status determination underscores the interplay of subjectivities among various individuals involved in the process, including decision-makers, interpreters and invited experts. In recent years, several asylum authorities have introduced new technologies into the asylum procedure. This article focuses on the adoption of two specific tools, 'automated dialect recognition' and 'automated mobile phone data analysis', by German authorities to support country-of-origin determination and assessment of applications. Drawing on social constructionism and sociology of knowledge, the article investigates the circumstances under which these tools have been integrated into the decision-making process and explores their implications for asylum procedures and practice. It shows that these tools serve to reinforce a bureaucratic logic that prioritises speed, and that this shift is embedded in a broader trend of digitalisation within public administration and reflects an assumption that asylum seekers are inherently deceptive. The analysis demonstrates that authorities construct objectivity by outsourcing the analysis to private tech companies, i.e. entities that are outside the decision-making process, and by using numerical probabilities that appear to produce precise outcomes. Ultimately, the article argues that these technologies obscure existing subjectivities and place the burden of proof on applicants.
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