Green Pass: ok and the Privacy Guarantor stakes
Green Pass: the position of the Guarantor for the protection of personal data
Since June 28th Italy is all in the white zone and the covid-19 pandemic is in a phase of retreat (delta variant permitting). This means that to move from one region to another you do not need any reason, no self-certification or any document.
At the same time, however, the green certification introduced to track movements between Regions of different colors and releasable after a negative swab (valid for 48 hours), after completing the vaccination cycle or on the basis of recovery from Covid-19 infection.
This was accompanied, from 1 July, by the green pass, the European green certification that allows travel within the European territory.
What is the green pass for?
It is not just citizens who are asking this. To sound the alarm about an uncertain use of the certificate is Ginevra Cerrina Feroni , cice President of the Guarantor for the protection of personal data. " The indeterminacy could open to disproportionate uses of the certificate , perhaps with differences between the Region and the Region – said the vice president in an interview with La Verità this week -, not just to participate in a big event (which may be reasonable) , but perhaps to go to a restaurant, to the theater or to exercise fundamental rights-duties, such as going to school or to work ".
The protection of constitutional guarantees
The Guarantor for the protection of personal data, in an emergency period in which fundamental freedoms have often been waived (such as that of movement on the national territory), supervised compliance with the constitutional guarantees, underlined Commissioner Cerrina Feroni. “The democratic Constitutions, especially those written after World War II, contain guarantees and protections. We call them "protected democracies" – said the lawyer Ginevra Cerrina Feroni -. The Privacy Guarantor is part of this set of guarantees. Specifically, we deal with data protection. We monitor and check, just to stay current, the measures gradually adopted to deal with the Covid-19 emergency . The identified tools – I am thinking of the Immune App or the Green pass – end up storing a lot of data. We verify that they are not an opportunity to collect more information than necessary. This can lead to abuse ".
The criticalities of the green pass
Even before its introduction, the green pass had aroused concern on the part of the Guarantor. "We asked that the Green Pass does not display detailed data, that is, if the person was vaccinated and where, or where he had the swab, or when he recovered", Guido Scorza , Commissioner of the Authority, clarified in the past to Repubblica guarantor chaired by Pasquale Stanzione. The reason is the universal principle of data minimization: "The verifier does not need to know these details, only that the certificate is valid".
Doubts (resolved) about the App IO
And precisely to protect the citizen from the abuse of the use of their data, the guarantor obliged PagoPA , a company wholly owned by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, to modify the terms for the transfer of citizens' data of the IO App. This application, which should become the single portal for accessing public administration services, is used to apply for the green pass. With an ad hoc provision, the Guarantor had banned the use of the app to download the certificate "due to the critical issues encountered on the same " because it was responsible for transferring citizens' data to three companies: Google, Instabug and Mixpanel . The unblocking of the application has arrived because PagoPA has undertaken to provide for " a series of technical measures to protect the privacy of users ", accepting the remarks about the privacy protection risks raised by the Guarantor.
The vaccination obligation: it is necessary to pass the law
Concerns about the uncertain use of the green pass are compounded by those about the introduction of a de facto vaccination obligation. "The Constitution, art. 32, protects health as a fundamental right of the individual and collective interest. It certainly does not exclude that there are vaccination obligations, so much so that there are some in our legal system and the Constitutional Court has judged them legitimate – says the lawyer Cerrina Feroni – The problematic node is the mandatory nature of vaccines still in the experimental phase of which, for obvious reasons, the effects in the medium and long term cannot be known ”. Healthcare workers are subject to the vaccination obligation by the Covid Decree of April, which was converted into law on June 1st. The dangerousness of the delta variant is causing a request from many sides to extend the obligation to the entire population. "Where the treatment is carried out in an obligatory manner, it is clear that the legal basis must be sought in another instrument, for example the law, and not in a consent that at this point discharges all the responsibility for the choice on the administered ", concludes the Deputy President of the Guarantor for the protection of personal data.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/green-pass-ok-e-paletti-del-garante-privacy/ on Sat, 10 Jul 2021 06:44:13 +0000.