Proof of Immunity and the Demise of Privacy (2030)
By 2030, digital identities will increasingly integrate health and immunity data to enable personalized healthcare, disease prevention, and secure access to public services. While this integration will strengthen public health and improve healthcare efficiency, it will also expand government and corporate access to sensitive personal data, creating significant risks to privacy, surveillance, and individual freedoms. Organizations and policymakers that establish transparent data governance, robust cybersecurity, and privacy-centric regulatory frameworks will be best positioned to balance innovation with public trust.
“30 %
Share of all stored data that relates to health (2020) ”
“1200
Data points from smartphone facial scan (2019)”
Public concerns about health security override worries about privacy. Governments integrate immunity and health data with national identities facilitated by digital identity platforms. Insufficient regulatory control risks the possibility of pervasive and invasive surveillance.
Context
In recent years there has been a growing and global ambition to better manage, integrate and interrogate medical data. But, despite the technological achievements around data use in other industries, maximizing its potential for better healthcare has been slow, mainly because the vast majority remains proprietary, fragmented and scattered. There are valid reasons for this; insurers, providers, health record companies, government agencies, and researchers are all concerned about the ethics, not to mention commercial sensitivities, of sharing data.[1] And yet overcoming this mindset could provide huge benefits for diagnosis, integration and the personalisation of care, so there is growing momentum to scale and combine new sources of personal, societal and clinical information. [2] Support for this has accelerated given the pressing need to both manage and find a vaccine for Covid-19. Indeed, many agree that linking personal health data to identity would be a major step forward to better controlling the outbreak of disease.
A pragmatic response to a pandemic is to dial up tracking, tracing and wider bio-surveillance in order to isolate the virus and manage the contagion. But this may come at a cost. Privacy advocates warn that it is precisely in times of crisis that governments focus too much on short term need without robustly exploring the potential consequences; the impact on the right to a private life or the risk of greater surveillance, for example. This is particularly relevant in the midst of widespread efforts to develop national (and other) digital identities[3]. However, such is the pressure on healthcare systems, a significant number of experts we spoke to now expect that by 2030 unified health and identity datasets will be accepted in several regions and that ‘proof of immunity’ may well have become a core component of everyday life.
