Digital transformation has become trendy, but there are good and bad digital transformations. Let’s check the following example with the Covid passport model:
The General Administration allows us to generate a QR code from the information collected in National Health Service and get the NHS Covid Pass. This is digital, indeed. We download it to our mobile, but, as sometimes we don’t know how to find important things when are urgent, we send it to our partner by WhatsApp, to have it handy. Then they ask us to show it at the bar. We look for it and show it to the waiter, Josh; and Josh, with an App that reads QR codes, verifies that this QR corresponds to person X and his vaccination status is OK with what is established nowadays. But we are not done. The second step is to guarantee that X is me and for this reason we show the ID card. As Josh, the bar waiter, is a clever guy, he makes a 1: 1 comparison between my face before having breakfast with the mask on and the ID card photo that we didn’t even take out of the leather wallet and that is half blurred, with holograms above and grayscale. That photo that looks like a mugshot. With an accurate look in their eyes, Josh offers me the first coffee of the day.
It is clear that the public administration have a long way to go so that the digital transformation allows Josh to read from his mobile my digital accreditation that I have in my eWallet. Accreditation that I am not going to download 20 times and saturate the public administration’s server system, in addition of spreading personal information based on a QR that anyone can read.
Nevertheless, thanks to the Blockchain technology, there are safer and more effective ways to offer control of their personal info to the citizens. In this way, me, as a citizen and guarantor of my peresonal info, I decide to whom I give my personal info and revoke their access whenever I want; I can trace all accesses to my personal info and I can biometrically prove my identity without the need of Josh having facial recognition capabilities. We can delegate this one-step verification to a machine without storing any data and giving access to my digital identity safely, encrypted and without human intervention.
So then, we can talk about digital transformation and guarantee the sovereign control of the identity of each person. Otherwise, what we do is digitize, which is not the same and, just in case, I take it printed in my wallet to make sure I find it.
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