“Those who buy Patriot should be offered the new-generation Franco-Italian SAMP/T. Those who buy the F-35, should be offered the Rafale,” French president says.
You have a one in seven chance of seeing your health data migrate to the Microsoft cloud and fall under American law, and therefore under the good will of its president, Donald Trump, and the Doge’s boss, Elon Musk. So, happy? Yes, you may be among the 10 million French people randomly selected as part of the Darwin EU project, coordinated by the European Medicines Agency and led, in France, by the public interest group “Plateforme des données de santé,” better known as the Health Data Hub (HDH).
In a decision published on March 11, the French National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties (CNIL) gave the HDH the green light to select a random sample of 10 million people representative in terms of age, sex, and department of residence from the main database of the National Health Data System, the vast majority of which is issued by the National Health Insurance Fund. The objectives are certainly laudable: to determine the prevalence and incidence of drug and vaccine use in France using a standardized methodology.
Less laudable, the host chosen to store this data is Microsoft. In 2020, as part of a summary procedure, we already warned that sensitive health data of the French population hosted by Microsoft fell under American law due to the company’s domicile in the United States. In October 2020, the Council of State recognized this risk of extraterritoriality of American law. A month later, in a letter dated November 19, 2020, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, urged the government to completely eliminate, within two years, the risks posed by the hosting of health data by an American operator.
Five years have passed: the technical solution is still Microsoft. The US authorities, now represented by Donald Trump, will therefore be able to issue subpoenas to Microsoft to disclose the health data of 10 million French citizens. In its opinion of March 11, 2025, the CNIL (French Data Protection Authority) warns of the risk of “disclosure to foreign powers of data stored with a host subject to non-European law” and regrets the lack of a sovereign solution.
Are the very people in government who boast of defending our country’s “sovereignty” leading us up the garden path for over five years? Hand on heart, we are told that a call for tenders is being prepared to select a European host. Words, words.
Also France: https://www.liberation.fr/idees-et-debats/tribunes/non-au-transfert-des-donnees-de-sante-de-10-millions-de-francais-dans-le-cloud-de-microsoft-20250403_HARQIHZNPBHNLNXJCOTYHCCC6A/
Google translation of a few paragraphs
You have a one in seven chance of seeing your health data migrate to the Microsoft cloud and fall under American law, and therefore under the good will of its president, Donald Trump, and the Doge’s boss, Elon Musk. So, happy? Yes, you may be among the 10 million French people randomly selected as part of the Darwin EU project, coordinated by the European Medicines Agency and led, in France, by the public interest group “Plateforme des données de santé,” better known as the Health Data Hub (HDH).
In a decision published on March 11, the French National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties (CNIL) gave the HDH the green light to select a random sample of 10 million people representative in terms of age, sex, and department of residence from the main database of the National Health Data System, the vast majority of which is issued by the National Health Insurance Fund. The objectives are certainly laudable: to determine the prevalence and incidence of drug and vaccine use in France using a standardized methodology.
Less laudable, the host chosen to store this data is Microsoft. In 2020, as part of a summary procedure, we already warned that sensitive health data of the French population hosted by Microsoft fell under American law due to the company’s domicile in the United States. In October 2020, the Council of State recognized this risk of extraterritoriality of American law. A month later, in a letter dated November 19, 2020, the Minister of Health, Olivier Véran, urged the government to completely eliminate, within two years, the risks posed by the hosting of health data by an American operator.
Five years have passed: the technical solution is still Microsoft. The US authorities, now represented by Donald Trump, will therefore be able to issue subpoenas to Microsoft to disclose the health data of 10 million French citizens. In its opinion of March 11, 2025, the CNIL (French Data Protection Authority) warns of the risk of “disclosure to foreign powers of data stored with a host subject to non-European law” and regrets the lack of a sovereign solution.
Are the very people in government who boast of defending our country’s “sovereignty” leading us up the garden path for over five years? Hand on heart, we are told that a call for tenders is being prepared to select a European host. Words, words.
Macron is a hypocrite, all talk no action