Taken to court for robbing private data at GGDs during pandemic | Coronavirus

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Mar 28, 2023 at 00:22 Update: 4 minutes ago

The State is being taken to court because of a major theft of private data from the computer systems of the GGDs. The purpose of the lawsuit is compensation. The ICAM Foundation, the party behind the mass claim, will hand over summonses to 35 government agencies on Tuesday.

These include the Ministry of Health, the national GGD GHOR Nederland, regional GGDs, safety regions and the municipalities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

At the beginning of 2021, it was revealed that GGD employees were trading in the private data of people who had been tested for coronavirus infection.

That data was extracted from the GGD systems and sold on underground marketplaces. The main suspects were convicted for this. According to the summons, the employees were not properly screened, they had access to much more data than necessary and it was not properly recorded who viewed what data.

According to ICAM, 6.5 million people were affected

ICAM says a total of 6.5 million people could have been victims of the data theft. For most, it is not clear whether their data has actually been stolen, but it could have happened. For them, the foundation demands 500 euros in compensation per person.

According to the GGDs, there are about 1250 people who are certain that their data has been stolen. They should receive 1500 euros in compensation for this, according to the ICAM Foundation. If the claim is upheld in full, the amount of compensation would amount to around 3 billion euros.

133,619 people have joined the claim. The claim for damages is directed against the Ministry of Health “because it is responsible for the design of the IT systems used by the GGDs”, according to the initiators. At a consultation last year, the ministry offered an amount of 500 euros for the 1,250 confirmed victims, and nothing for the others. ICAM found that offer too meager.

The foundation wants more openness in the government

The summons itself has about 220 pages, and there are about a thousand pages of appendices attached to it. According to the ICAM Foundation, the claim for damages is about more than just money. With the lawsuit, the foundation says it wants more openness from the government, which would withhold reports. “What’s the situation? What has been the impact of the data breach? What measures have been taken? What needs to be improved?”, explains a spokesperson.

Moreover, the foundation says it wants to prevent things going wrong again. “It is important to keep the government on its toes. Normal companies get a hefty fine. If I do something like that I will be bankrupt tomorrow, but nothing will happen with the government itself. Compensation is a financial incentive to do better,” says a spokesperson.

The ICAM Foundation expects that a lawsuit, due to all the intermediate steps, can last at least until 2026. The costs of the process are advanced by the company Liesker Process Financing from Breda.

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