SICCAR enables government organisations to protect citizens from fraudulent activity, identity theft, and unauthorised data use.
With an expected influx of health & vaccine passports, now is the time to take control.
Sharing health data today is inefficient and insecure.
It typically involves paper-based and static digital solutions which were already not fit for purpose pre-pandemic. But now, these solutions represent a direct threat to public health, and risk delaying recovery of an economy and society reeling from the measures used to contain the spread of the virus.
The crisis creates the urgent need for systems which can share health status at unprecedented scale, from international to intra-national scale. With the right planning, the crisis may bear the opportunity to accelerate these benefits beyond the immediate pandemic recovery.
Despite an initial focus on vaccine passports for international travel, return to public life is making the demonstration of health credentials in domestic settings both inevitable and essential. Industries with financial imperative for a return to normality are already employing different systems and technologies to achieve this.
Proving your health status securely and verifiably requires trust between citizens, public and private stakeholders to establish that reliable, dynamic citizen health data sharing needed to move public and working life and leisure to a sustainable new normal.
In the UK, a failed centralised contact tracing approach has shown public opinion in favour of decentralised systems with strong foundations of security, privacy, and consent, if they are to be considered ethically acceptable and get to popular scale adoption.
In the coming months, many approaches and solutions will be proposed to implementing vaccine passports and wider sharing of health data, across the COVID pandemic and future health events, and a wide range of contexts.
What needs to happen, if we are to make vaccine passports and related initiatives a success:
We recommend the following guiding requirements for the acceptability of health status / vaccine passport solutions to the stakeholder organisations which collaborate to build and support them, and the citizens and businesses to be comfortable in using them:
- Demonstrably trustworthy data: To enable trust and confidence, it should be possible for stakeholders and subjects to verify the integrity of data back to the authoritative organisational sources, and consequently prevent fraud and misrepresentation.
- Privacy and consent: Citizens should have a transparent view of how their health status information is used, and have the choice of relying stakeholders. Revocation of consent should be enforceable.
- Cyber Secure: over time such solutions will become critical infrastructure for the operation of society. Solutions must minimise risks of data breach and maximise robustness and availability.
- Interoperable: For solutions to be fully effective, user experiences are consistent to simplify adoption, and governments should enable open (and citizen consent based) access to public health information so that 3rd parties can innovate.
Why SICCAR?
SICCAR enables organisations to work in decentralised trust to share data. In a world of many health data sources, SICCAR provides necessary orchestration for data assurance and governance. It enables transparent data sharing policies, between organisations and citizens, to be developed and enforced. Within these policies the citizen remains in control of consent to their data.
For reliable vaccination credentials and verifiable shared health status data, co-operation of public health and other stakeholder organisations is essential. Beyond the simplest vaccine passport scenarios, it becomes impractical for any one central organisation to facilitate this trust.
SICCAR enables health status / Covid vaccine solutions to meet the requirements outlined above. It provides orchestration between data sources to deliver verified health status records – for maximum public trust and confidence.
Using SICCAR, public health and private stakeholders, together with the citizen, are linked across a decentralised trust network in which they are empowered with consent over the data they wish to share, giving maximum privacy protection.
SICCAR leverages proven Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and wallet-based cryptography in a scheme which provides the minimum risk of data breach and maximises reliable availability of data across the network of organisations. Moreover, it enables interoperability through open data standards and utilises existing government, organisation and self sovereign identities.
Why it is important that the Government acts now:
- Avoid being overrun by non-compliant and unfit for purpose initiatives.
- Work with SICCAR to define the rules and standards, and to orchestrate data from different sources.
- Protect citizens from data/identity theft and fraud.
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