Digital ID, vaccine passports are expanding to pets & livestock: UN AI for Good report

Tim Hinchliffe
Tue, 15 Jul 2025 16:38:03 +0000
Government and Policy, digital id, Digital Identity, globalism, great reset, perspective, united nations, vaccine passports

Humans, animals & commodities alike are all to be digitally tagged, tracked-and-traced equally: perspective

The same digital identity and vaccine passport systems deployed by governments and corporations on human populations during lockdowns are now expanding to include pets and livestock, according to the latest UN AI for Good report.

Whether the track-and-trace tech is for humans or animals, the verbiage is almost verbatim.

Last week, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which is the United Nations agency for digital technologies, published a massive 866-page “UN AI for Good Innovate for Impact Interim Report 2025,” detailing numerous AI applications in development, along with current use cases.

On page 33, we find “Use Case 5: AI-Driven Biometric Animal Registration for Animal Welfare and Global Health,” which takes all the track-and-trace technologies used on people under the guise of “slowing the spread” of COVID-19 and transfers that over to animals, so we get things like digital pet IDs, digital horse passports, and digital vaccine records for all creatures great and small.

“The system must enable digital storage and retrieval of comprehensive animal metadata, including identification details, vaccination history, and health information”
United Nations, AI for Good Innovate for Impact Interim Report, July 2025

Source: ITU

“Physical identifiers like tags or microchips are vulnerable to tampering or misuse, leading to animal identity fraud, where one animal is intentionally or mistakenly presented as another. This undermines the integrity of registration, traceability, and disease control systems“
United Nations, AI for Good Innovate for Impact Interim Report, July 2025

The UN report highlights the work of South Korean Company iSciLab, which aims to address the following problem:

“Traditional animal registration using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchips is invasive, costly, and impractical in many regions. This limits pet identification, hinders rabies vaccination tracking, and results in poor enforcement of animal welfare policies. Especially in low-income areas, unregistered stray animals contribute to zoonotic disease spread and animal neglect.“

Replace “pets” and “animals” with “humans” and “people” and switch “rabies” for “COVID” and you’ve got the same track-and-trace scheme we experienced during lockdowns.

“Traditional animal registration using RFID microchips is invasive, costly, and prone to issues such as chip migration, incompatibility, or failure. These barriers hinder widespread adoption, especially in low-resource settings, resulting in unregistered animals and poor vaccination tracking—an acute public health risk, particularly for stray animals in regions like Africa.”

After people and pets, the next step is to implement digital IDs and vaccine passports for cattle and other livestock in our food supply.

“The system will later be expanded to livestock such as cattle and horses to support broader needs in animal traceability, food safety, and disease management”
United Nations, AI for Good Innovate for Impact Interim Report, July 2025

Explore practical ways AI is being applied to solve real-world problems with use cases, regional innovation, and global lessons in this latest #AIforGood Innovate for Impact report https://t.co/wqH9BvOsbK pic.twitter.com/hnuOYqih8c
— Int’l Telecommunication Union (@ITU) July 9, 2025

“In collaboration with the Korea Racing Authority (KRA), we will also develop a digital equine passport system that integrates biometric identification with health and performance data to benefit the racing and breeding industries”
United Nations, AI for Good Innovate for Impact Interim Report, July 2025

The agenda to track-and-trace people like cattle and other commodities is well-documented.

As World Economic Forum (WEF) founder Klaus Schwab wrote in his book from 2017, “The Fourth Industrial Revolution:”

“Any package, pallet or container can now be equipped with a sensor, transmitter or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that allows a company to track where it is as it moves through the supply chain—how it is performing, how it is being used, and so on.”

“In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people.”

Fast forward eight years, and the RFID chips are giving way to facial recognition and other biometric identification methods that can be retrieved using a smartphone.

Source: iSciLab

For animals, the latest biometric craze is “nose print imaging” where an animal’s unique nose print acts like a fingerprint.

For humans, you can take your pick for biometric identification: fingerprints, iris scans, gait detection, facial recognition, brainwave activity, heart measurements, DNA swabs — they’re all in there.

The main point is that humans, animals, and commodities are all to be tagged, surveilled, and traced equally.

“End-to-end trade digitalization requires a global approach to digital identities of natural and legal persons as well as of physical and digital objects sending or receiving electronic information to avoid creating digital identity silos”
WEF & WTO, The Promise of TradeTech: Policy Approaches to Harness Trade Digitalization, April 2022

Source: WTO & WEF

For another example, in 2022 the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the WEF published a report “encouraging the development of a global certification framework” for digital identity systems of persons and objects — both physical and digital.

While the report, “The Promise of TradeTech: Policy Approaches to Harness Trade Digitalization,” is concerned with digital identity as it relates to digitalizing global trade systems, the seed has been planted to normalize the idea of treating people like animals and products to be tracked, traced, and monitored for compliance with certain standards.

Just as sensing technologies can track and trace products through their “life cycles,” the same can be said about tracking humans through their own “life cycles” via biometric data and digital identity schemes.

This is true in several countries, more recently in Pakistan and Nigeria.

Earlier this year, the Nigerian government published a framework to develop national Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) that will utilize digital ID to track and trace “key life events” of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.

“The Federal Government of Nigeria is on a mission to appropriately deploy digital technology to support Nigerians through these significant and profound moments so they can integrate into the state and enjoy the benefits of citizenhood from cradle to old age”
Supporting Life Events: The Nigeria Digital Public Infrastructure Framework, March 2025

Source: Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Communications, Innovation, and Digital Economy

Pakistan is ahead of Nigeria as digital ID has already become a standard feature in every Pakistani’s life.

According to a WEF blog post from July, 2024:

“At the heart of Pakistan’s digital transformation is the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA), established to overhaul the country’s identity systems.”

“This was a foundational change, positioning Pakistan among a select group of nations equipped to manage comprehensive digital identities for over 240 million citizens.”

“The NADRA-issued Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC) is now a standard feature in every adult Pakistani’s life, facilitating a range of routine tasks such as opening bank accounts, purchasing airline tickets, acquiring driver’s licenses, and qualifying for social protection, thereby ensuring seamless identity authentication for every citizen”
WEF Agenda, “Digital public infrastructure is transforming lives in Pakistan. Here’s how,” July 2024

Source: WEF

The push to track-and-trace people like animals and products throughout their so-called lifecycles is not just coming from the UN, the WEF, or the WTO, but also the B20 and the G20.

If we go back a couple of years, the leaders of the 2023 B20 India Summit published their annual communique recommending that the G20 nations: “Promote the digitization of identities at the individual, enterprise, and farm levels that are both interoperable and recognized across borders.”

This digital identity is not just for identity verification, but is also for “governments and private stakeholders” to have access to other types of information about you, including your health records, business dealings, land use, consumption habits, and finances.

The latest AI for Good report shows this type of data is now being collected for pets and livestock (minus their business dealings and finances).

“G20 nations to develop guidelines for unique single digital identification for MSME [micro, small and medium-sized enterprises] and individuals that can be securely accessed (based on consent) by different government and private stakeholders for identity verification and information access within 3 years”
B20 India Communique, August 2023

Source: B20 India Communique

Whether it’s people, pets, or livestock, the end result is the same.

Digital ID, vaccine passports, and contact tracing for all.

The UN AI for Good report notes that the types of metadata being collected for animals include:

Animal biometric images (nose print, facial features)

Species/breed/age/

Owner info

Vaccination history

All these systems are increasingly becoming interconnected and interoperable.

How long until your own digital ID, which includes your vaccination status and carbon footprint tracker, will be tied to that of your pet’s?

Image Source: AI generated using Grok

How to track & trace every person, purchase, and protein on the planet & manipulate human behavior

Nigeria outlines cradle-to-grave DPI, digital ID scheme for all citizen ‘life events’

Pakistan’s digital ID is now a standard feature in every adult’s life: WEF, UN, World Bank

G20 should promote digital ID at individual, enterprise & farm levels: B20 India Communique

WEF & WTO push ‘global digital identity of persons and objects’