Health pass, QR codes, all anticovid: our health data in danger

Posted on April 19, 2021-A+

By Bernard Perbal.

The protection of health data has been the field of challenges for several years whose ins and outs are far from being known to the general public.Some will tell us that the mass that is not intelligent enough to understand the decisions made at the top does not have to think.

The policies and senior officials who swarm at all levels of the millefeuilles of the pyramid of power are there to surreptitiously impose the irrefutable fruits of their knowledge and their ability to govern despite the immense incompetence of those who, in the fieldsMore varied from our society, have arrived at key positions by the play of musical chairs attributing to all kinds of golden promotion to the skies of the irresponsible and immutable irresponsible.

It should be noted in passing that according to the Wall Street Journal, the WHO Commission responsible for investigating the possible sources of COVVI-19, will not publish its provisional conclusions.

Inconsistency of political discourse

Since our leaders were forced to recognize the serious health risks associated with the galloping propagation of the corona virus disease 19 (COVVI-19) pandemic induced by the eponymous virus, it is clear that the inconsistency of political and scientific discourseswill remain an indelible marker of the current five -year term.

In January 2020, the negation of the risk of importing the China virus by Agnès Buzyn:

Followed by his regrets which, leaving the Ministry of Health, knew "that the tsunami wave was before us.»»

Government procrastination on the wearing of the mask making say in March 2020 to the Minister of Health Olivier Véran:

Prime Minister Édouard Philippe relying behind the multiple reversals of certain scientists, lies concerning the availability of masks whose port will finally become compulsory in Paris at the end of the summer and three months after the first deconfine, in companies,High schools and colleges.

So many examples that have altered the confidence of citizens towards their government.

The series of affirmations devoid of a scientific foundation will take a new face with, among other things, the unrealistic promises of the Stopcovid application and a mass vaccination which was to be led round, to finally rise to us, with 2.8 vaccinations per 100people, in the twenty-first place in the 27 countries of the European Union having carried out a vaccination dated February 5, 2021!

On January 29, 2021, the declaration by the president before the foreign press, of the almost ineffectiveness of the Oxford Astrazeneca vaccine for people over 65 was not a positive factor.

Several other European countries adopted a similar position after it, while the Regulatory Agency for Medicines and Health Products of the United Kingdom (MHRA) maintained:

The decision of the High Authority for Health (HAS) of February 2 not recommending its use beyond 65 years but inviting caregivers under 65 to be vaccinated has generated an additional reluctance of the personnel referred to.

On February 25 Alain Fisher declared:

This development and the fact that the Astrazeneca vaccine is very effective in fighting the English variant of the virus, would seem to have returned the vaccinations on the way despite the evil that had been done by loss-free assertions of foundation.

This brief reminder illustrates the central place of vaccine adventures in a universe subject to high pressures of commitments and financial interests representing only the tip of the iceberg negotiations which president of the efforts of eradication of the COVVI-19 carried byThe different stakeholders.

Jointly in these considerations, initiatives appeared to convince considerable interest, praised by more or less coherent political discourse, digital tools for tracing virus and medical data management in the context of the Pandemic.

Health data: Identification and tracing of people affected by COVVI-19

The speed at which the virus has quickly exceeded the capacity of public health agencies historically dedicated to manual monitoring of contacts, as it had been led to reduce the spread of epidemics like those which were caused by the virussevere acute respiratory syndrome (SRAS) or by the Ebola virus.

In addition to human resources and the time it requires, this approach is penalized by the imprecision of memories, which is more when the individuals concerned finding themselves in very frequented public places where the brevity of contacts affects memory and identificationIndividuals encountered.

The digital research of contacts can be based on different information technologies, more or less intrusive towards different aspects of privacy.

For example, China and South Korea have imposed data collections based on facial recognition and data transmission techniques relating to the geolocation of cell phones on their populations, such as GPS signals or recognition cameras locatedin public places.

The use of such techniques without the participants giving their consent to the use and conservation of their data would not comply with the requirements set by the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) which requires that:

Digital identification systems based on a voluntary basis in Europe and the USA, they use applications that the user himself downloads.

It was made the choice not to use intrusive technologies for privacy based on geolocation of the GPS or WiFi type.

As part of the digital protocols used in France, the distance separating two smartphones carried by people who rub shoulders are estimated on the basis of the intensity of Bluetooth signals issued and received by configured phones so as to be able to communicate.In simple terms, the greater the signal force, the closer the devices are close to each other.

The technological choices of France to develop Stopcovid and all anticovid applications make it an isolated rider in Europe, the other countries that have chosen the applications developed by Google and Apple.

Google and Apple have retained a solution based on data storage only in user smartphones, making it possible to identify them while guaranteeing their anonymity, in order to avoid centralized data storage and ensure greater safety.

Pass sanitaire, QR codes, TousAntiCovid : nos données de santé en danger

French applications Stopcovid and all anticovid use a centralized model that stores non -nominative, anonymized data on central servers controlled by the health authorities.

This choice does not allow European inter-operation on which the Commission worked.Europe, by the voice of Margrethe Vestager, commissioner in charge of digital and competition, regrets the position taken by France, which despite its many declarations, paradoxically opted for a less protective solution of data going to theposition adopted by other countries of the European Union.

While some do not find desirable inter-operability, its defenders plead for the compatibility of tracing applications of all other European countries for security issues, despite the fact that from one country to another these applications havemet with a very different success.

Regardless of the fact that it may have suffered from a lack of compatibility with its European counterparts, the Stopcovid application did not have the expected success, despite a cost of accommodation and maintenance billed up to 300,000 euros permonth.

With 2.3 million downloads and 72 notifications sent in three months, Stopcovid, launched on June 2020, was a bitter failure according to Prime Minister Jean Castex and the project to add objects connected to this type of application Abeen suspended for the moment.

The all -anticovid application therefore took over from the previous one.

Its principle is unchanged.The goal is to warn the user if he was in contact with an individual tested positive at the COVVI-19.

The application takes into account the contacts located for less than a meter for at least 15 minutes provided that the smartphones all containing anticovid were in operation at the time of their meeting.

This system requires a positive tested person to declare himself as such via the application which will then notify the individuals-contacts during the period qualified as contagious.

For symptomatic positive people, this period starts 48 hours before the first symptoms appear.If the person tested positive is asymptomatic, the contagiousness period begins seven days before their positive test.

In order for this system to be effective, it requires a strong adoption of the ALL anticovid application, estimated at 20 million users.

According to Cédric O, the Secretary of State for the Digital Transition, the number of downloads of all anticovid in mid-January would be 12.3 million with a total of 50,000 people notified.

However, according to an update of February 9 noted on March 9:

The lack of enthusiasm of the population with regard to Stopcovid and Tousanticvid applications most certainly results from a loss of confidence instilled by the contradictory speeches of our rulers.

Wouldn't it have been easier to ensure the strict application of barrier gestures?

The Hope of the Secretary of State is to see the number of users grow with the addition of practical features and the entry into force of the QR codes whose functioning is scheduled soon.

Cédric O recalls on this subject that the obligation to use a QR code to access Pubs in Great Britain has increased the number of users of the tracing application to 20 million.

What to think of this desired evolution?

First, it can be regretted that the solution chosen by the government calls for centralized external storage, which will represent a tempting prey and much more provided in data than a smartphone for hackers eager for large operations.

The field of public health has undergone very substantial data violations in recent years with financial damage estimated at millions of dollars.The cyber attacks directed towards the centers hosting medical data are very clearly increasing.

For example, intrusion into the medical database of a regional health center in Norway in 2018 ended in corruption of more than three million sensitive medical data.

Likewise Lifelabs, one of the largest groups of medical analysis laboratories in Canada, was the victim in early November 2019, a cyber attack with ransom request, concerning 15 million patients.

Finally, we will retain the recent looting of health data concerning 500,000 patients who have attended several analysis laboratories using the same processing software.

Centralization of data is inevitably more risky than their fragmentation on independent supports.

Whatever the basic technology, the use of these applications requires on the one hand that the smartphone concerned is constantly on to allow its detection by Bluetooth, and on the other hand that its contact user is quite isolated in a crowdpotentially provided in contacts, to be reliably detected.This last point should not constitute an insurmountable obstacle.

It is regrettable that the French system rigorously incompatible with that of the majority of other countries cannot benefit from the experiences and improvements that can emerge from a group approach.

The case of contagious, asymptomatic unidentified people as vectors poses an insoluble problem by using these contact identification techniques.

The reconciliation of the health data collected by all -anticovid type applications, with those provided by the use of QR codes will constitute a gold mine for data aggregators.

QR Code, potential danger for the protection of ebble health data

According to Professor Graham Greenleaf, the situation can be schematized as follows.

Two entities generating health data will coexist:

On the one hand, an application for identifying contact cases, which can be hoped to be respectful of the principles of respect and protection which are generally attached to them by the regulations in force (GDPR in Europe for example).

The use for a period of six months of an anti -covid application to fight the propagation of the virus in Australia made it possible to identify 17 cases which would have escaped human surveillance such as that which is mentioned above.

On the other side of the QR codes that have become almost compulsory, which are not subject to any effective regulation of respect for privacy and which will take more and more importance with time.

The strict rules of supervision of the collection of medical data through currently in progress monitoring applications, contrast very strongly with the negligence of the leash type from which the QR codes industry benefits.

For example, QR Codes are increasingly used in the United Kingdom in the banking sectors but also to help monitor infected people and their contacts.

While QR Codes technology already existed in the 1990s it had not found the infrastructure necessary for its adoption.

Today, the lack of legal supervision relating to the dazzling development of this type of identification by QR code under the influence of the pandemic, poses serious problems concerning the collection and use of data subcontracted by a vastPanel of codes suppliers.There is no regulation of quality control and privacy protection applicable to QR codes suppliers.

It is essential that governments very strictly supervise the future of the personal data collected by the organizers of festive meetings, restaurateurs, bars and other commercial brands which only ask to resume their activity to compensate for the considerable losses suffered.

Personal identifying data, such as names, email, telephone number and other sensitive data, collected by these QR codes suppliers have great market value these days.

Finally, the computer risks that come with the growing use of QR codes should not be overlooked, so much popular with cybercriminals to penetrate the most intimate data to which these codes end up giving access.

The avowed objective of the French government today is to be able to record consumer's actions in real time in order to be able to alert individuals who have been in contact with patients.

If the objective may seem laudable at first glance, it involves personal data use which is similar to a violation of privacy as defined and protected by the GDPR.

The limitation of access to certain sporting, cultural, culinary, or leisure activities, based on the reading of QR Codes constitutes discrimination incompatible with the fundamental freedoms which have been granted to us by the rights of the human and citizen.

The health pass et le fichage de la population

The collection of health data through platforms or sanitary pass recalling the most horrible moments of a past still present in all minds, has been a recurring marotot of greater governments of all kinds.

The digital file of individuals: some reminders

In April 1946, the National Statistics Service became INSEE to which the NIR management was entrusted, used for the verification of the electoral lists.The NIR is notified to Social Security by INSEE and its use has been extended to the Ministries of the Interior, Work, Agriculture and National Education.

In the whirlwind of IT development, INSEE decided on the one hand to centralize in 1971 identification directories in Nantes as part of the implementation of an automated system for administrative files and the directoryIndividuals (Safari project) and on the other hand to merge this data in February 1972, with the national file of insured persons of the National Old Age Insurance Fund which included the addresses of all the people listed.

It was the door open to the interconnection of databases contained in the electronic files of public and associate services.The centralized manipulation of the personal data collected had to lead to the filing of the French!

This project was revealed in an article in the newspaper Le Monde in 1974 and aroused in the population a feeling of unacceptable state surveillance.

These strong reactions have led to the promulgation in 1978 of the law relating to data processing, files and freedoms, which has remained a legislative model guaranteeing the protection of personal individual data.

Since Safari, several other files implementing automated processing of personal data from the French population have emerged, with more or less difficulties and remarks of the CNIL.

We will remember for example:

With three new decrees published on December 4, 2020 and creating the PASP, GIPASP and EASP files, the possibilities of political filing are reinforced.A decree published in 2021 completes for a period of three years the procedures for monitoring by the tax authorities of the content of social networks in order to track down possible tax fraud.

Health data

Before briefly tackling the attacks on respect for individual freedoms and the privacy of the persons that constitute the fichages based on health data, it is useful to briefly define what they are and what are the means implemented fortheir collection and exploitation.

Health data sont définies de manière très large au paragraphe 15 de l’article 4 du RGPD :

This information may concern the state of health present or future of the person concerned.

Health data peuvent prendre la forme de documents écrits (ordonnances, certificats médicaux…), oraux (enregistrements de compte rendus opératoires, de visites médicales, …), ou informatisés à la suite de la dématérialisation grandissante des informations manipulées par les praticiens et les services et de santé.

The definition of health data, which does not appear rigorous enough, constitutes an obstacle to the development of innovations using the exploitation of phenotypic characteristics resulting from the expression of the genome.

The grouping of all these characteristics under the same legal qualification binding their users to a risk analysis concerning the protection of privacy, seems completely inappropriate.

The principle of excessive precaution having guided the legislators is not reasonable and finds its roots in France in the absence of individual responsibility of a population to which one could explain the risks, but which takes refuge at any time behind theGovernment Responsibility.

According to such a principle, the development of cars or any other means of modern transport would have been prohibited on the grounds that they were potentially fatal ...

The National Health Data System (SNDS) created by the law of January 26, 2016, was replaced by the Health Data Hub (HDH), formalized by decree of November 30, 2019, despite the concerns that the Cloud choice triggeredMicrosoft for accommodation.

The CNIL has also made a very severe opinion on HDH by worrying about the terms of appeal offered to citizens whose health data will be included in HDH, and conditions for implementing public information.

HDH will contain health insurance data, hospital invoicing, medical causes of death, medico-social data for people who are potentially interesting for private players who would have access to it.

All health data, collected within the framework of an act reimbursed by health insurance, will be centralized in the Health Data Hub and will constitute sources of development of automatic learning algorithms for medical use.

The filing of medical data restructured by the creation of HDH is on the way to be reinforced by the implementation of a health pass.

Although the invalidation of the Privacy Shield by the Court of Justice of the European Union does not allow the exchanges of personal data of the HDH stored by Microsoft, in some cases, the Cloud Act could however make it possible to bypass this prohibition of transfer.

Plus récemment, une critique du même type a été soulevée à l’encontre de la plateforme de prise de rendez-vous médicaux Doctolib, par un collectif de médecins et de patients ayant déposé un référé auprès du Conseil d’État sollicitant « l’annulation du contrat liant Doctolib et l’État dans le cadre des prises de rendez-vous pour la vaccination contre le COVID-19»».

Indeed, this partnership also rented by Cédric O, brews a large amount of health information under conditions that do not comply with the GDPR.Indeed, the accommodation of health data collected by Doctolib, victim of a recent hacking of data that revealed health information relating to 6128 meetings, would be based on the choice of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

The health pass

Compte tenu de l’ignorance relative du monde de la recherche médicale à propos des subtilités de la biologie du Covid-19, il est légitime de se poser quelques questions pertinentes relatives à la nature des critères qui permettront aux « heureux élus»» de bénéficier d’un pass sanitaire leur ouvrant les portes à des activités quasi-normales dans une société amputée de plusieurs libertés fondamentales.

Lors d’une visioconférence avec les chefs d’État de l’Union européenne, le président Macron aurait dessiné les contours de ce pass qui « ne sera pas un passeport vaccinal»», mais qui permettra d’envisager la réouverture des lieux culturels et des restaurants fermés à cause de la pandémie.What about other businesses?

Mr. Macron said:

Insistant sur le fait que ce pass ne serait pas un passeport lié uniquement à la vaccination, le Président aurait précisé que « nous ne saurions conditionner l’accès»» des lieux qui pourraient être rouverts « à une vaccination, alors même que nous n’aurions pas ouvert la vaccination aux plus jeunes.»»

The low percentage of people vaccinated to date would undoubtedly give a great taste of health discrimination to a selective distribution of permissions to fully enjoy the pleasures of life ...

On what basis would this health pass be attributed?

Would there be medical predisposition indications of a susceptibility to the covid on which a selection would be based?

Is this parody only an incoherent discourse combining the political illusion with the harsh reality of life for affected people?

Anyway, the terrible reality is also the one that the countries seeing in the creation of a health passport tend to impose an economic tool whose implementation would sweep away from a back of hand all the efforts made sincedecades to maintain and protect respect for the human person.

Could it be a new symptom attributable to proven neurotropism of coronavirus?

This article was published on 03/10/21 and updated on 03/10/21 at 11:47 am

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