Immunity Passports and the Perils of Conferring Coronavirus Status

In January, a Swedish entrepreneur named Joakim Hultin co-founded Sidehide, a new digital app intended to streamline hotel reservations. Weeks later, some of the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 were reported in Europe. Almost instantly, Hultin told me, "demand stopped." Before the pandemic, Sidehide was working with a London-based company called Onfido, which uses artificial intelligence and facial recognition to verify identities. Hultin learned that Onfido had created a way for users to upload a serology test to a private server and use facial biometric data to unlock the data and display the results.