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Europeans' health data sold to US firm run by ex-Israeli spies (ftm.eu)
118 points by Fnoord 2 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 45 comments




Do Europeans care if their health data is secret or not? I feel in the US its a big deal that people dont want insurance companies to measure them and deny coverage to those who need it most, but in most of the world that isn't an issue.

Yeah we do. For many reasons:

Privacy is privacy. I ideally don’t want any of my data sold to anyone, but health data is even more vulnerable.

In my country it was even a big deal when they allowed different doctors to access your health data via a common system, as there were e.g. concerns that the information recorded by one doctor might bias another doctor, so some felt that it should be your choice what data to share between different parts of the public health system (except for explicit referrals).

Moreover, most European countries do have private doctors, private hospitals, and private health insurance – it’s just way less used than the public system. Those would have the same concerns as in the US.


> Do Europeans care if their health data is secret or not?

Can't speak for all Europeans, but in my neck of the wood, Germany, they do very much.


Of course we do. And for exactly the same reasons, too.

> Do Europeans care if their health data is secret or not?

Do Europeans care if their private and personal data is secret or not? What kind of question is that?


Isn't an issue yet.

Deeply

Why would they not?

You still wouldn't necessarily want a life insurance company to know stuff they haven't formally asked to know, you still have health information that could be used to blackmail you or whose reveal would be humiliating or upsetting.


For sure, yes!

As an European, I HATE when my data is mishandled or leaked (and this is basically the entire point of the GDPR)

I mean, of course? This is why I opposed electronic health record ( EPD (elektronisch patiëntendossier)) back in the days. Even then, SSL (TLS) downgrade attack existed and was known to NSA. IIRC EPD was started as opt-in, then opt-out, then mandatory.

I received my daughter's ASD diagnosis via Zivver. This included very personal details about her life. No parent would want that to be public. For adults it is worse: they become vulnerable to extortion, and Mossad is known to go very far for the cause.


I've never seen Zivver used in German Healthcare.

Also Germany uses and is already Rolling out a Matrix-based Messenger and S/MIME-Mail with End-to-End-Encryption for Communication between Healthcare Professionals.

So at least for Germany this is not a problem.

More problematic was our prior health Minister who wanted to make data accessibile to OpenAI et al for "research". That's also why I opted out of the electronic health record

https://www.heise.de/news/Lauterbach-zu-Gesundheitsdaten-Goo...



It's always companies run by Unit 8200 ex-Israeli spies that are running these telemetry-/ad- surveillance dragnets, and there's never any retaliatory action against them.

Like how about a call to Benny's office saying "hey buddy, reign your dogs in, our citizens are off limits"?


It isn't a "telemetry-/ad- surveillance dragnet". Kitenet's product is a "Private Data Network (PDN) to control, monitor, and secure data exchanged between people, machines, and systems across user collaboration, automated workflows, and enterprise AI".

It stands to reason that ex-cryptographers from Unit 8200 would use the expertise they gained to launch legitimate companies that provide cybersecurity solutions.


I think it’s much more likely they’re creating honeypots as contractors. There is a lot more money in surveillance than privacy

Is there any factual basis to this claim, or just your personal opinion? It's like claiming Oracle's real business isn't a database, but rather stealing customers data which was stored in Oracle's databases. Or practically any other company that has access to customers data.

It's not inevitable. It's up to us in a shared world to decide how to govern ourselves and live our lives. Not to be at the whims of a small group of powerful strangers.

Online scamming and malware are Israel's most cherished national industry, they've been specializing in this stuff for nearly 30 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Download_Valley

> Download Valley is a cluster of software companies in Israel, producing and delivering adware to be installed alongside downloads of other software.[1] The primary purpose is to monetize shareware and downloads. These software items are commonly browser toolbars, adware, browser hijackers, spyware, and malware. Another group of products are download managers, possibly designed to induce or trick the user to install adware, when downloading a piece of desired software or mobile app from a certain source.

> Although the term references Silicon Valley, it does not refer to a specific valley or any geographical area. Many of the companies are located in Tel Aviv and the surrounding region. It has been used by Israeli media[2] as well as in other reports related to IT business.[3]

Getting an Israeli extradited is almost impossible, their in-group ethnic bias is so strong that they even fight the extradition of rapists. The Israeli government would rather see a jewish rapist escape justice in Israel than face justice in a gentile nation. Extraditing some businessmen who merely scam and destroy people's computers? Fat chance in hell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malka_Leifer_affair

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-jewish-american-pedophiles-...


Based on your wiki almost all of those are from 2010 era and shut down long ago

The US has always had a number of grey market scammy businesses like those too. Lots of countries do.


Could the same not be said about the US?

I suspect it'd have a different spin put on it.


No the US has no issue with extradition.

[flagged]


You're kidding, right? Boca Raton, FL has been widely recognized as the spam capital of the world for decades, and has nothing to do with ethnicity or religion whatsoever. Eastern Europe is known for being a den of cybercrime groups, and Russia is known to turn a blind eye. China is widely known to cooperate with domestic cybercriminal actors. Non-jewish geographically concentrated threat actors are openly discussed all the time.

The difference is that none of these places operate as legal safe havens for child sex predators.



Israel is gonna have a really big PR problem as the boomer generation ages and dies.

The patch is already on the way: Any public criticism of Israel will be labeled as anti-semitism and any anti-israel posts in US and EU social media will be removed for breaking ToS and "hate speech" laws, similar to what Germany already has in place.

The latter has always been true already of mainstream social platforms like Facebook, and the former isn't a patch, that's the old strategy. It's not working anymore.

The Larry Ellison purchase Tiktok, CBS and possible Warner Bros/CNN is still in play ensuring a media takeover.

It's too late to matter. Try finding someone under 30 who isn't already a zionist that has anything positive to say about Israel. It's like pulling teeth.


Not really. Elon was always open to let everyone post anything they want about Israel on X.


TL;DR: An EU health data firm run by ex-military cryptographers offers a web portal for encrypting documents, which inherently exposes unencrypted documents to the company and US national security laws. The media outlet incidentally also doubts the trustworthiness of military veterans from Israel.

Even following the "if there's smoke there's fire" model, unclear there's a strong scent of "smoke" here. One could write a similar guilt-by-historical-association article concerning anyone, in the same position, really. Obviously if you're uploading a file to a 3d party website, the vendor has some technical access, this should be warned.


The bigger problem is that this model is inherently flawed. Even if end-to-end encryption with browser crypto were implemented, there is never any security since the code in the browser can simply be swapped with compromised code that diverts the plaintext somewhere.

I've been forced to use this service, by way of healthcare professionals just disclosing correspondence to this service without asking for my consent.

Smeerlappen.


Security is an illusion.

It isn't merely a health data firm. It is used to share information between government and civilians and NGOs and civilians, and among these are health services. For example, Immigration and Naturalisation Service of The Netherlands (IND) uses it, too. Another example is also mentioned in the article, about court communication in The Netherlands. Even my kid's school uses it.

The company Zivver was Dutch and started out because the Dutch did not want to be dependent on third parties for confident data (health being an example). Therefore, Zivver shouldn't have been sold, given the importance of the data.

That it is irrelevant the (parent) company is located in USA I do not agree with. The fascist leader of said country is pressuring EU, and has tools available to do so (CLOUD act). Furthermore, he has proven to not care about legal status and legality, and has told big tech to ignore the European law. Besides, if you control the software code, you can hack around it being FOSS (see also why OpenPGP.js is vulnerable to such attack).

Moreover, in the Dutch version of this article, security researchers easily found vulnerabilities in the software. They claim to have zero knowledge, which is BS. If one of the two parties does not have a Zivver account, the data is send plain text as well.

It isn't far fetched to believe Kiteworks is a front for the Israeli intelligence apparatus.


I’m actually quite surprised one could author such an article in the European Union without being arrested. I didn’t think they were allowed to publicly acknowledge toxic behavior of any outgroups.

Where do you source your information about the EU?

That's one of the dumbest things I've read today.

Maybe you should stop watching Fox News, or wherever you are getting your Propaganda from


They will be discredited.

What

Pointing out ethnic affiliation is a crime in most european countries

Can you cite a law or verdict, here?

Germany and Spain I've dealt with in my own career as a lawyer. Not uncommon either.

To clarify, each country has a very broad protection of special identities enshrined in their constitution which in practical application leads to easy convictions related to targeting marginalized groups based on their criminal codes. A negative tweet is enough. A quick google search will provide hundreds of examples.


Please be specific

Do you want the German or French version?



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