How Airline Companies Could Use Blockchain Technology - Opinion
By: Menajem Benchimol
Tags: Blockchain, Facial Recognition, Airlines, Technology, Data

As humanity advances and technology becomes more part of our daily lives, we are starting to come up with ethical obstacles on how to pursue innovation. Scandals concerning data handling are scaring whole populations on data privacy, making the future seem to come out of a George Orwell book.

From Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, Huawei’s 5g integration, and the surge of surveillance capitalism all around. It seems it is time for a change of direction regarding data distribution before it gets ugly.

Before we get into the blockchain side, let me take you on a brief road down history lane to the invention of the Internet. The Internet was the outcome of dozens of years of research made by scientist, engineers, and programmers to create an online network of information (History channel). It wasn’t until the 1990s that regular people were allowed to surf the internet and connect with people from around the world.

As the years passed by, companies leveraged the technology to allow users to obtain instant information about almost anything (Google and Yahoo), purchase books from anyone, anywhere (Amazon), and connect with friends and family across the world (Facebook). The success stories of the internet are some of the most powerful companies in the world today.

Now, some of these companies have seen data as a new commodity for years. Even The Economist remarked “Data as the new oil”. Internet companies have monetized their users data for years, by offering their services for free. As the saying goes “if you are not paying for it, you are the product”. Many internet companies have revolved their business models around their users, making billions along the way.

A lot of companies have been trying to catch up to the “freemium” strategy and try this new model of capitalizing on its user's data.

For future generations, this could become a big problem as the internet was not created to transact valuable information with its current infrastructure. Today, billions of people around the world are connected via the internet, and billions of data requests are processed every day. To comply with the magnitude of requests, companies store their data in one central place. The problem with this system is that if a malicious party were to gain access to such data center, it can breach millions of valuable data points.

This can happen to anyone with big cybersecurity budgets. Think of Equifax, Yahoo, and Marriott. These are companies all across industries, and millions of people were affected.

Maybe the problem is not the security companies provide, but the infrastructure they used in the beginning? It’s time to upgrade the highway for data transactions, and the answer is blockchain/distributed ledger technology.

What is Blockchain?

Blockchain is a technology that proposes, executes, stores, records, and distributes transactions made by parties that do not necessarily know each other. Each transaction is accumulated in blocks between two parties and creates a triple way accounting system for anyone to verify that a certain transaction took place as each party gets a copy of the transaction.

If each copy reconciles with the proposal, the transaction is approved. Because everyone in the network has access to the past, it is impossible to change its history, making this technology censor resistant and immutable. To put it all together, blockchain offers consensus mechanisms to incentivize honest validators acting as nodes giving their resources to the network as their work.

The only way to propose a transaction is with the consent of the owner of such account. With blockchain, true digital sovereignty can become a real thing.

Bitcoin was the first successfully blockchain based application as it doesn’t need a central entity to run the network. In fact, in its ten years of existence, the network has never failed.

Why would an Airline need Blockchain?

Imagine living in a world where users control their digital assets and personal data.

Airlines clients could benefit from blockchain technology because their data would be truly owned by them. Should the airline need access to a clients data, the client itself would have to give consent to the company as it is the only one that could begin the transaction.

For example, there was a situation where a JetBlue customer was boarding a flight and noticed a facial recognition technology was used to grant her access to the flight. JetBlue never asked for permission to follow such procedure.

Now, would JetBlue use a blockchain system, they would need to ask their passenger to grant them access to their data before their flight because, in order to access such data, they would need her permission.

This way any future passengers would have peace of mind that the company they are doing business with, is being honest, trustful, and transparent on how they handle their data. Passengers would be able to verify the handling of the data on a blockchain explorer as well.