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From the airline industry, to business, to friends and family, everyone wants to see things change and spend time with others again. A central aspect is finding a safe and secure way to share your COVID-19 health status discuss is a digital “health passport”. Many of these approaches are promoting blockchain technology as part or central to their passport solution.
Leading question: is blockchain a necessary component of a health passport?
Short answer: In most of the solutions proposed today, blockchain technology is not required.
As we all know, in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was hope that once you contract the virus you would be immune to future infections. There were many news articles about the possibility of mass availability of tests to show whether or not a person possessed COVID-19 antibodies.
Numerous initiatives launched quickly offering to provide safe and secure proof of this immunity. These were called immunity passports. Blockchain was part of many of these initiatives, and some claimed they could be GDPR compliant. Many of them said they would take advantage of blockchain technology as part of the solution to provide evidence of data integrity.
There is little in the news about immunity or immunity tests today. As a result, there isn’t much interest going on in these projects. But did they need blockchain in the first place? Or was it just another attempt to grab a title?
There have been several attempts to use the blockchain for health passports.
In October, IBM announced its initiative, the Digital Health Pass. The promise of the Digital Health Pass is for organizations to submit the required criteria for returning employees to the office or for an airline to decide whether passengers are safe to travel. The Digital Health Pass uses IBM Blockchain technology, but is it necessary?
In April 2020, Open University unveiled its approach to COVID-19 immunity registration. The solution uses blockchain technology and Tim Berners Lee’s personal data pod concept (Solido)
And there has been substantial initiative from 60 self-sustaining identity companies, including Evernym and Sovrin, among others. The collective is working to apply blockchain technology to the challenge of providing access to health data as part of identity.
More recently, there has been a significant push from major airlines to provide a COVID test results passport provided by CommonPass to be accepted by more countries. This project is arguably the best use case where blockchain would be beneficial, yet ironically, there is no mention of blockchain from any of the ads.
The biggest problem with most of these initiatives is that they rely (with the possible exception of the OpenUniversity initiative) on data stored centrally or at least in the cloud. Identity data will always be available that will link people’s achievements with their identities. In most cases, the solutions are managed by a single company, organization or government – they are all centralized.
The most obvious advantage attributed to the blockchain is that the data will be immutable. All data can be verified as tamper-free from a specific time.
For any business exploring or studying blockchain technology, this is quite significant. The main advantage of the blockchain is evidence of tampering.
To be very explicit and clear: Blockchain does not prevent tampering. Blockchain technology does not prevent theft or access to data. In these cases, the only thing the blockchain can provide is proof that the data has been tampered with / changed or not.
So what should be true for blockchain to be part of a health or immune passport solution?
But to address the challenges of governments and big tech, most solutions will only use a database.
For the blockchain to add incremental (real) value and be critical to the success of the project (not just a title) it would require five things:
- There would be no need for a central authority – no one would profit from the blockchain infrastructure for the project. A non-profit entity will manage it. (And lack of profit is one of the biggest killers of blockchain projects)
- The solution should address a minimum and specific set of goals and objectives: to provide evidence of a COVID test result. There would be no identity data anywhere in the blockchain. There would be no chance for companies like Palantir or any other big data company to extract or analyze data. The concept of anonymised data is a mistake.
- Entities (test centers, hospitals, etc.) would be validated or certified before being allowed to enter the network and authorized to report results. Entity information would be available to anyone for auditing and compliance.
- Multiple entities, preferably globally, manage the network to properly distribute data and updates to the network are constantly verified and validated before being added to the blockchain.
- The user experience for consumers, test centers, airline staff, office security, or anyone else who queries or adds data needs to be simple and straightforward. As few people as possible should know that blockchain is part of the solution. The best technology is invisible.
There are privacy advocates who are currently working on a solution where a consumer’s identity is verified by showing only a photo of him to the test center worker (who compares it to the person sitting across from them). Once identity is verified, a unique QR code is scanned and the test applied. The test result is associated with the unique QR code and written on the blockchain.
To check someone’s health or immunity, the person shows their photo on their phone and confirms their identity. The verifier then scans the QR code and queries the blockchain and receives an immediate response.
There is no record of the individual. There is no record of the test center that submitted the result. There is no identity or entity information stored in the blockchain.
This type of solution fulfills the main problem statement: providing evidence of an individual’s health status without compromising privacy.
So yes. Blockchain could be part of a health passport solution.
Still, it’s unlikely to be widely adopted because it doesn’t meet other governments’ requirements – knowing identities, tracking the spread of disease, providing an evidence base for audits, and more. It won’t be hugely profitable for big techs who want to charge licensing fees for open source software and who would definitely want to mine big data to profile people (as they generally put profits for their shareholders before social responsibility)
It is for all these reasons that the most likely solution for these health passport offers will be to use a centralized database. They will not use the blockchain at all, except, perhaps, to obtain securities or to attract funding.
Get in touch with us [email protected] / Twitter @igetblockchain.
Troy Norcross, co-founder Blockchain Rookies
Troy Norcross is an international speaker, educator and strategist on Blockchain as an enabler to transform business models. Troy has provided blockchain training and strategic support to major banks in Europe, Asia and India. Troy specializes in enterprise-scale business model transformation projects where Blockchain technology enables business models, strategies and efficiencies, which were previously not considered possible.
Troy is co-founder of Blockchain Rookies. He has a career spanning over 25 years spanning multiple market verticals including agriculture, aerospace, IT infrastructure, telecommunications-media-technology (TMT), digital music, healthcare innovation, e-commerce, and most recently Blockchain business strategy for businesses, industries and business ecosystems.
Twitter: @troy_norcross
