A week before the establishment of health "brigades" to fight against the coronavirus, the president of the Cnil Marie-Laure Denis listed, this Tuesday, a series of safeguards to respect on the personal data of patients.
These health brigades will be responsible for "investigating" infected patients to identify all the people they have encountered and warn them of their risk of contamination. In the coming days, the government will submit to the CNIL its draft decree detailing the data that will be collected and the files that will be created by these health brigades.
Data kept for a maximum of one year
For Marie-Laure Denis, president of the institution responsible for protecting the privacy of French people, the Cnil will be "particularly attentive to the duration of the data that will be kept, and to the relevance" of these. The bill currently debated by the Parliament provides that the data collected by the health brigades will be kept for a maximum of one year.
But perhaps some data can be erased, or at least made inaccessible faster, suggested Marie-Laure Denis during a hearing at the National Assembly. Data relating to the identification of "contact cases" (crossed by an infected person), or certain responses from infected people do not necessarily need to be kept for as long, she explained. "Some data related to completed investigations" around an infected patient "should be deleted soon enough, well before the end of the epidemic," she said.
Controls implemented by the CNIL
The Cnil will ask to see the questionnaire that the health brigades will offer to infected people. "It will therefore be necessary to give very clear instructions to the investigators and on what they can ask for and then collect" from the contaminated people, and "on what they do not have to know", also underlined Marie-Laure Denis. The Cnil will be “particularly careful to avoid as far as possible that (…) the investigators have free space where they would put unnecessary information”, she explained.
The president of the Cnil will also conduct "controls from the first weeks of the system" to verify compliance with the provisions governing the work of health brigades, she warned. Marie-Laure Denis also believed that it would be “justified” for the government to consult the CNIL if it decided to adopt future ordinances on this subject.
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