Of course it happens to be in Germany, but we are globally aware when it comes to the wisdom of the opinionated crowd.
In Germany this week doctors and civil rights activists joined forces to organize a boycott of the German smartcard program, attracting huge media interest, including national TV.
The new alliance claims that smartcards in healthcare are the first step towards a system of national “mega-servers” which contain aggregated patient data in centrally stored shared electronic patient records.
Interestingly, one partner of the new anti-smartcard alliance is the ‘Chaos Computer Club’, an association of hackers that 18-months ago managed to ‘free’ – gain access to – the only independent cost-benefit analysis of the German smart card project yet carried out.
The key goal of the anti-smartcard alliance is to persuade citizens to boycott the roll out of the new cards by, for example, not sending in the photographs necessary to produce the cards.
Given the considerable media attention, reactions from official bodies have been muted. “The arguments of the critics do not become better by repeating them again and again”, said a spokeswoman of the German Ministry of Health.
Is this an example of our privacy friends running amok? Or, as there usually is in these cases, some thread of valuable insight into a future that we might want to think about.
