The coverage was global and across industries: the Known Traveler Digital Identification program captured the imagination, combining buzzy concepts like blockchain, cryptography, and data privacy into a solution for the future of identity.
Accenture and Marriott, in partnership with the World Economic Forum, have floated the concept as a means to further encourage travel across the globe. Rather than accepting immigration chokepoints as inevitable, Marriott identified that a better (more secure and more efficient) ID would facilitate the continued growth of international travel.
For its part, Accenture's technology practice built a working prototype for the annual WEF conference in Davos. The proof-of-concept is already on its way to testing in Canada and the Netherlands. It's a seemingly-impossible dream: a digital ID that follows your travels anywhere in the world, eliminating physical passports and traditional visas. It's all electronic, allowing travelers to be pre-vetted in advance of a trip. This speeds up the immigration process, making it both more efficient and effective.
While there's definitely the creep factor when it comes to the idea of a global digital identity, the technology's structure allows travelers to have more control over information shared with authorities. Users can theoretically turn on and off sharing of specific details, so only the necessary information is shared.
This controlled sharing also applies to governments, as each government can decide which information needs to be shared through the blockchain with other governments.
By avoiding the vulnerabilities of bringing all information into a 'data lake,' the technology increases security while still allowing governments to share important information about travelers. This dramatically reduces the risk of an Equifax-sized breach of government systems -- a risk that is very much a possibility in today's centralized structure of government ID technology.
The full video from HEDNA conference