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The Catalan Data Protection Authority (APDCAT) analysed this Wednesday at the Mobile World Congress the new challenges posed by the protection of personal data by the use of the European Health Data Space (EHDS), an initiative that puts into place mechanisms to safely share health data, by rules, common standards and practices, infrastructures and a governance framework.
As part of the Digital Health program of the 4YFN, the Authority organized the panel "Data protection challenges by using the European Health Data Space", with the participation of Marit Hansen, State Data Protection Commissioner of Land Schleswig-Holstein (Germany), and Meritxell Borràs, director of the Catalan Data Protection Authority, and moderated by the head of APDCAT's Legal Advice, Xavier Urios.
In her speech, the director of the APDCAT pointed out that the European Health Data Space vastly increases possibilities to create new products and services that improve people’s welfare and recalled that privacy by design is essential for a product or service to be competitive on a global market.
Borràs defended that it is necessary to always keep in mind that behind the data there are people with rights and freedoms, and that privacy by design provides tools to better fulfil the objective of defending them.
For her part, the State Data Protection Commissioner of Land Schleswig-Holstein, Marit Hansen, pointed out that processing health data means high risk, and reminded that data protection regulation requires risk mitigation. In this sense, Marit indicated the convenience of the use of encryption and pseudonymisation to ensure prevention of identification for all unauthorised stakeholders, and assured that anonymisation in the health context is often not useful. Hansen also mentioned data sharing protocols for interacting with data intermediaries which could also be useful for accountability purposes and for enabling users to exercise their data subject rights.
The APDCAT participates from February 26 to 29 in the 4YFN event, within the framework of the Mobile World Congress, with the aim of recalling the importance of implementing privacy from the origin of the design of products and services among startups and entrepreneurship.
In the framework of the Mobile World Congress, the Catalan Data Protection Authority has this year promoted the defence of privacy in the use of the European Health Data Space, in a panel within the Digital Health program, hold by the State Data Protection Commissioner of Land Schleswig-Holstein, Marit Hansen, and the director Meritxell Borràs.