NY's digital wallet (disguised as a health passport), the Excelsior pass, just bit the dust.

IBM is headquartered in Armonk, NY and it produced the Excelsior pass for the Empire state. Is the EU passport being adopted by the WHO and UN supplanting it?

This is still up on the NY state website today:

What is New York State Wallet?

Building on the successes of Excelsior Pass and Excelsior Pass Plus - a secure, digital copy of your COVID-19 vaccination record or negative test result - New York State Wallet is a safe, secure and free mobile application available in more than 10 languages. NYS Wallet provides one convenient place to add State-issued digital passes, licenses, and records for quick and easy access.

NYS Wallet strengthens New York’s commitment to transform the way it delivers services to its residents and visitors with modern, accessible and innovative technology.  

New York is dedicated to continuing its digital journey, with more passes, licenses and records to come!

But just above it is the notice that the “NYS Wallet App will be discontinued on July 28th.” However the Excelsior Pass, the Excelsion Pass Plus and the Smart Health Cards Framework continue to be advertised. I hate how the PR consultants try and trick people with language: the pass will ‘empower’ individuals by sharing their health information with unknown ‘partners’ and ruining their privacy.

It was only going to cost the citizens $2.5 million dollars. Or so they said. on June 9, 2021 the NYT wrote that the price could hit $17 million, or 6.8 times the amount originally claimed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/09/nyregion/excelsior-pass-vaccine-passport.html

New York’s Vaccine Passport Could Cost Taxpayers $17 Million

The state’s contract with IBM details a Phase 2 of the Excelsior Pass, which could include uses that some advocates say raise privacy concerns.

New York officials introduced the Excelsior Pass app earlier this year as the country’s first government-issued vaccine passport, designed to help jump-start the state’s economy.

But newly obtained documents show that the state may have larger plans for the app and that the cost to taxpayers may be much higher than originally stated.

The state’s three-year contract with IBM — obtained by an advocacy group and shared with The New York Times — to develop and run the pass establishes the groundwork for a future where at least 10 million people in the state would have an Excelsior Pass. It would provide them with a QR code that would not only verify their vaccination status but could also include other personal details like proof of age, driver’s license and other health records.

The total cost could end up being as high as $17 million, much more than the $2.5 million the state had initially said it cost to develop the program.

The contract also requires IBM to deliver to the state a “road map” to scale the digital health pass to 20 million individuals — the entire population of New York. The ambitious vision contrasts with the limited uses for the pass that the state has so far described to residents.

This was Cuomo’s baby.

By May 2023 the costs had shot up—considerably—again. More than 25 times the original bill. And why did they need the expensive consultants for a simple app? Maybe it wasn’t so simple? What else was in that app?

https://www.timesunion.com/state/article/excelsior-pass-ballooned-64-million-keeps-rising-18091575.php

Excelsior Pass costs ballooned to $64 million and keep rising

App spending is part of $200 million contract with Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group that's now facing scrutiny

May 14, 2023

ALBANY — They called it the Excelsior Pass. The first-in-the-nation app would provide a "secure and streamlined" way for people to attend live events and restaurants without digging out their vaccine card.

It would be built by IBM, and it would cost $2.5 million.  

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo pitched it in March 2021 as a key to reopening New York's economy amid the damage wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, a tool that would bring New York "one step closer to reaching a new normal." Nine months later — after Cuomo's resignation — Gov. Kathy Hochul celebrated the technology's "transformative impact on our economy."

In October 2021, Sandra L. Beattie, then deputy director of the state Division of the Budget, called it an example of successful government-run technologies in an informational "blueprint" on the app that New York was touting to other states: "When the public sector shirks its duty to innovate and modernize, citizens are the ones who lose out," she said. 

The state decided early on to outsource the work on the app. While that aspect of the project didn't change, the stated cost to taxpayers definitely did, and quickly: In June 2021, the New York Times noted that the pass would actually cost $17 million; a follow-up report two months later indicated that price tag had grown to as much as $27 million.

More than two years after Cuomo's initial announcement, the payments to private companies for the app have multiplied well beyond that figure, even as the waning of the pandemic means the Excelsior Pass is rarely if ever used — and opens the related question of how many booster shots are needed to be "up to date" according to the app. The current cost is $64 million, a previously unreported sum that includes funds paid to IBM as well as to two consultants on the project, Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte, according to records obtained by the Times Union. 

The work by Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte was just one element of $200 million that flowed from New York to those firms that is now the subject of a state state inspector general's investigation. As the nation's COVID emergency fades from the front page, the spending renews the debate about New York's ongoing use of contracts that were amended without public oversight during the pandemic. 

"Those are the dangers of emergency orders and no-bid contracts and a lack of checks and balances," said Bill Hammond, senior fellow for health policy at the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank. "Those are all dangerous situations, but they grew out of a true crisis that warranted waiving some of those rules, at least for a time."

The state says roughly 11.5 million New Yorkers have used the Excelsior Pass, which would amount to a cost of about $5.60 per app-using citizen. The state has paid Deloitte and Boston Consulting Group nearly $28 million to work on the app, according to records obtained by the Times Union. State officials have paid an additional $36 million to IBM for its work on the pass. 

"While the pandemic-driven need for ready access to vaccine records has subsided, the app continues to offer New Yorkers a safe and secure mobile application that brings state-issued digital passes, licenses and records directly to their fingertips," state Department of Health spokesman Cort Ruddy said in a statement.

The state continues to pay IBM $200,000 a month for data storage services related to the Excelsior Pass. In addition, in March the state spent $2.2 million for "application development" of the Excelsior Pass.

In the October 2021 blueprint package, Rajiv Rao, the former chief technology officer with the state Office of Information Technology Services, said "a collaborative team across New York state has worked day and night to develop the nation's first COVID-19 vaccination and negative test pass solution."

Rao worked on the project with the budget division's Beattie, who pushed for Deloitte to become the system integrator, according to a person familiar with the matter. Beattie worked for Deloitte roughly 16 years ago; her spokesman recently told the Times Union that no one who worked on the company's pandemic-era projects in New York overlapped with her employment at the firm.

Beattie was forced out of her job earlier this year; Rao took a leave of absence and then resigned. Neither have been accused of wrongdoing related to the inspector general's ongoing investigation or any other matter. 

"We are eager for the Office of the Inspector General to complete its investigation," Hochul spokeswoman Hazel Crampton-Hays said in a statement Friday. 

Hochul recently signed legislation to restore oversight of the state comptroller's office in reviewing contracts, a layer of advance review that was lost during the pandemic. 

Crampton-Hays noted the state is currently looking into whether the app can be "harnessed for additional, expanded purposes, in line with the governor's commitment to eliminating bureaucratic hurdles, simplifying processes and utilizing new technology to improve the way New Yorkers access services and benefits from state agencies."

Cuomo's spokesman Richard Azzopardi said the app was intended to also include broader capabilities than just validating a COVID-19 vaccination. He said the app was a critical tool at the time that also protected people's medical and personal information.

"The work required to build the secure database that housed this critical personal information was not possible using the existing expertise, and like numerous other states across the country, we worked with outside consultants to make it a reality," Azzopardi said in a statement. " ... Criticizing the project in hindsight is to have collective amnesia about the once-in-a-lifetime challenges we were up against.”

Azzopardi noted that the state's cost to produce and maintain the app would be reimbursable by the federal government because it was related to addressing the pandemic. [Wonder why the Feds want it?]

Consulting the private sector 

On Dec. 17, 2021, the Boston Consulting Group billed the state for nearly $10 million in costs related to its work reopening New York and on the Excelsior Pass — two interrelated state initiatives. The money spent on the Excelsior Pass, and its accompanying "wallet," continued to flow to the consulting groups even as the peak of the pandemic passed and the need for the app plummeted. 

Last October, Deloitte posted an article on its website about the development of the Excelsior Pass that does not mention the firm's involvement. Rao and Beattie are the only people quoted.

"We didn’t know exactly what we were building," Rao said in the post, "but we knew we all had the same goal of opening the economy back up as soon as possible."

"Citizens had such a positive response to the app because we built something that was for New Yorkers by New Yorkers," Beattie said. 

The same month the post went up, Deloitte billed New York for $3.6 million in Excelsior Pass costs. 

Deloitte declined to comment for this story. The Boston Consulting Group did not respond to requests for comment…. 

Technology Review took a look at the Excelsior Pass in 2021 and wrote the following:

We tried out the Excelsior Pass, New York’s state vaccine passport

When we tested the first statewide vaccine passport, we found privacy concerns, technical glitches, and questions over who it’s really for.

Experts question security 

Users must enter their name, date of birth, zip code, and phone number to verify their vaccination status or covid-19 test results. New York State’s website tells users that Excelsior data is safe and secure, while the privacy policy says it does not store the information sent via the app, or use location services to track people’s location. IBM assures users that their data is kept private and secure using blockchain and encryption technologies. 

But experts claim the privacy policy is woefully inadequate. Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (STOP), which opposes local and state surveillance in New York, points out that businesses use a separate app to scan the pass; when he tested it, he found that a user’s location could potentially be tracked by those scanners. As a result, the comedy club I go to might have a log of my visits there—and to any bars I go to afterwards that require proof of vaccination. Neither New York State nor IBM responded to requests to clarify whether scanning information could be collected or tracked. 

The lack of transparency is a problem, says Cahn. “I have less information on how the Excelsior Pass data is used than the weather app on my phone,” he says. Because the pass is not open source, its privacy claims cannot easily be evaluated by third parties or experts. 

But there’s little incentive to be more transparent. In developing Excelsior, IBM used its existing Digital Health Pass, a system it could sell in customized forms to customers from state governments to private companies seeking to reopen their offices.

“If IBM’s proprietary health data standard catches on, they could make huge sums of money,” Cahn says. “Transparency can threaten their entire business plan.”

Privacy and security questions become more urgent if the pass becomes more widely used. The pass is intended to build trust, allowing people to feel comfortable in crowds, yet for many it instead evokes fears of how it could be used against them.

Advocates in New York have proposed legislation to prevent vaccination records from being shared with local law enforcement or immigration authorities, but it was not passed in the legislative session that recently concluded. (We’re watching state policies, plans, and legislation related to vaccine passports in all 50 states.)

Today, the Excelsior Pass’ demise was announced:

Excelsior Pass to be shut down after use plummets, costs soar

Decision from state officials to turn off COVID-19 app comes after Times Union reporting

During the past two years, the app has been rarely used but cost the state at least $200,000 a month to maintain. It will sunset on July 28, state officials said, but the stored personal data it encompasses “continues to be private and secure.”

The decision follows Times Union reporting in May that highlighted the unexpected size of the cost of developing and running the application, which had been plagued with glitches in its rollout two years ago. That reporting also called into question the influence Deloitte and the Boston Consulting Group had with the development of the app. 

“Because demand for instant access to vaccine records [btw, you own all your medical records and carrying a paper copy ought to have been more secure and immediately accessible than putting your health data online—Nass] has subsided and the public health emergency has ended, the Excelsior Pass app will be discontinued,” Hazel Crampton-Hays, a spokeswoman for Gov. Kathy Hochul, said in a statement. “Going forward, the state will use knowledge gained from this project to improve how New Yorkers can use technology to access services and benefits.”