On Monday, the European Commissioner for the internal market met with the bosses of the largest European telecom operators, including Orange, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, Telecom Italia and Vodafone. Several points were addressed by Thierry Breton, including that of sharing operator metadata.
The exploitation of these data would allow researchers to model the spread of viruses in the population and to anticipate epidemiological peaks. The information collected would be anonymized and aggregated. Which is a way to protect the privacy of individuals. "This sharing of data would be done in compliance with general data protection regulations (GDPR) and e-Privacy," said a person familiar with the matter. The use of telecom subscriber data by third parties has many critics, worried about individual freedoms. The subject is all the more delicate in that in China, similar monitoring is used to “rate” citizens and grant them - or not - authorizations to move.
Regulatory adjustments
This would not be the case at all in Europe. To set up their models, the researchers would not need the data collected by all the operators, that of one or two large operators per country would be enough to set up a relevant monitoring and to anticipate crises. In principle, all these actors would agree. In some countries, this collection is already in place. In France, Orange is already working on the subject with Inserm researchers. “But this requires regulatory adjustments and an agreement from the CNIL. Thus, we should be able to keep data over a long period of time, or currently we have to delete it after one year, we would like to keep it for two years. This is absolutely essential work, "explained Stéphane Richard, the CEO of Orange last week at Le Figaro.
With this approach, Thierry Breton is trying to install a new mode of operation with digital companies. The European Commissioner met a first success last week with the major video platforms (Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime ...) who agreed to modify their practices to reduce their Internet traffic. Last week, he contacted the CEOs of Netflix, Google and Facebook directly to ask them to take emergency measures themselves. “This empowerment of economic actors is much more virtuous. It goes much faster than going through the implementation of legislative texts that would be adopted in a few years, “slips a close to the file.
A committee of researchers in France
At the same time, France announced on Tuesday that it has set up a committee of researchers and doctors who will be responsible for advising the government on practices enabling the identification of people in contact with those infected with the Coronavirus. The idea is to use geolocation data to try to halt the spread of the epidemic. This strategy has already been adopted by Russia, South Korea, and Israel.