Back in March of last year, in the early days of the pandemic, we started thinking about how we could put our expertise to work in getting the world going again. Having spent over six years delivering our Mobile Passport App to 9 million people to facilitate more secure and streamlined processes at U.S. customs and passport control, we figured our team could do something. If our encrypted, mobile technology shortened individual wait times at the border by an estimated two million hours, how could it help in a pandemic? We started “Zooming” in on the idea. We knew we were up to the task of helping to create the Airside App, equipped with mobile identity verification and sharing, plus Airside Health Pass functionalities.
Nearly a year into the pandemic, the value of verified digital identities is front and center, with COVID health status now being a new personal attribute that can be used to safely get back to traveling, work, school and life. Businesses, organizations, and governments have quickly responded by evaluating and adopting biometric-based digital identity products. For instance, Caribbean countries and U.S. states, like Hawaii, ask for- and judiciously process COVID-19 test results to enable people to move about their areas and economies freely. As of January 26, the U.S. CDC will require all air passengers to get a test for current infection within three days of their flight to the U.S. and provide documentation of their test results or proof of having recovered from COVID.
However, as you no doubt know from your own experiences, medical test and vaccination records are not easy to digitally access, let alone share. A number of testing and vaccine passport programs, such as The Common Trust Network and IATA, are focused on digitizing health credentials. We support these efforts and are collaborating with multiple trust frameworks and standards bodies. Airside has also partnered with tens of thousands of diagnostic labs to allow people to appropriately access COVID test results.
Our technology adds two important trust components that are critical to creating a seamless and secure way to access health information in a private and transparent manner. With Airside, individuals and organizations can be confident that COVID test results are source-verified to the correct individual and cannot be tampered, and businesses can be confident of the integrity of the information they rely upon to provide their customers peace of mind, maintain safety, and reduce the efforts of checking results manually. Secondly, we allow these verified test results to be easily and securely shared by the individual with a given organization, such as an airline, place of work or any other entity, on a time-bound basis. We provide consumers with the control and transparency they demand.
Our Airside Digital Identity App will enable individuals to enroll their personal information in a way that ensures no data can be accessed by anyone but that person and the organizations for whom the individual provides time-bound consent. The app will also provide remote and in-person touchless experiences at a multitude of digital and physical authentication points with consent-based, encrypted sharing of driver’s licenses, passports, COVID test results, and soon COVID vaccination credentials.
Our services will be available globally for use across a variety of sectors, such as allowing for a safe return to travel, work, and play. They are also architected to be open and interoperable across existing providers and locations — which enables us to deliver a seamless and safe experience via the integrations we’ve done with lab testing partners and airport technology systems.
We always advocate for the individuals’ rights to control their data. With Airside’s Health Pass service, our privacy-centric approach to sharing verified identity data has never been more necessary. That is a win-win-win for people, organizations and society.
