08 January 2021
Solidarity, sharing and mutual aid between the different actors are the central values in health care. Just as the Internet is a common good, medical informatics knowledge must be available and accessible to all. We therefore want to promote the special ethical dimension that the opening up of innovation in the medical field creates and we want to take active measures to prevent the privatization of medicine.
14 October 2020
A group of 18 plaintiffs from the open source community, patient associations, doctors’ unions, technicians and the journalism community has asked the State Council to suspend the processing and centralization of the health data of more than 67 million people in the Health Data Hub, hosted by Microsoft Azure, the American giant’s Cloud.
This collective denounced Microsoft’s choice essentially because of the absence of a call for tenders and the effects of the extraterritoriality of American law. Indeed, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) recently revealed that American information (via FISA and Executive Order 12,233) has no limitation on the use of European data.
25 2020
A group comprising the CNLL, the InterHop association, the Constances association and several doctors’ and patients’ unions - 18 claimants in all - had asked the Conseil d’Etat (Council of State) to suspend the processing and centralization of our data within the Health Data Hub hosted by Microsoft. In doing so, the plaintiffs asked the Council of State to comply with the latest European case law.
This referral followed the decision (“Schrems II” ruling) of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) which had decided to cancel the “Privacy Shield”, an agreement that allowed companies to legally transfer personal data from Europeans to the United States.
The CJEU had also argued that the Standard Contractual Clauses (SCC) were not sufficient. Indeed, US surveillance programs do not have any limitations on the authorization and use of data from non-US persons. This is simply not in line with European law and our protective regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
On this basis, any processing of personal data of European citizens in the United States must today be considered illegal without delay.
21 2020
The Snowden case revealed to the world the massive use of our computer data through globalized surveillance programs1.
In an equally brutal way, the confinement has made everyone experience the weight of deprivations of liberty imposed by a global health event.
If, according to a fundamental ethical principle that “technologies must be at the service of the individual and society” rather than “enslaved by technological giants”2, blind trust in technology carries decisive risks.
Indeed, the uncontrolled use of these new statistical tools could lead to the legitimization of anti-democratic and freedom-reducing systems.
16 2020
Since April 2020, French health data has been centralized within Microsoft as part of the “state of health emergency”. Some data is being transferred to the United States even though the European Court of Justice invalidated the “Privacy Shield” between Europe and the United States on July 16, 2020, on the grounds of an inadequate protection on American soil. On September 16, 2020, an unprecedented collective of 18 organizations and personalities filed a complaint in front of the Council of State to denounce this illegal transfer of personal and sensitive data. This lawsuit follows a first significant action initiated on May 28th.