Orban's far right government is a great straw man for testing public outrage levels and narrative impact for what every other government did (and worse). I dis

Orban's far right government is a great straw man for testing public outrage levels and narrative impact for what every other government did (and worse). I discovered that covid data is used in a similar way in Canada, where vaccination status data (name/dates/doses/addr/ph) was passed to a PR/oppo firm working for a politicians office. The data was sent to an outsourced call center to call people on behalf of a private PR firm that had the same name as an internal government department (a mere coincidence, surely). Given vaccination dates were and are a strong proxy for political leanings, this oppo research firm working for campaign offices is not only in posession of this medical information, but they shared it with call center contractors. I had a lengthy email exchange with the privacy office about it to get assurances of the privacy protections and recourse in the contracts, and they declined to provide copies of the agreements governing the relationship between this firm and the privacy protections for this medical information, and basically bumbled and delayed until I went away, ultimately yielding nothing. I didn't go to the press about it because the mainstream press could not be relied upon to be principled and investigate privacy breaches and other abuses during covid for fear of enabling hesitancy, and going the alternative media route would just set me up for retaliation by the government, so I let it go since as a privacy professional, I had got evidence of my suspicions about how egregiously the data has been handled. The rollout was one of the most cynical abuses of public trust in history, to the point where the Atlantic published a piece about "amnesty" for the people behind it - for what precisely, we are only learning now in trickles and spurts. If this is something you care about, contact the agency or the privacy officer of the government department that administered your vaccinations and ask them for the list of parties your data was shared with, and for copies of the privacy impact assessments they were obligated to do, and the contracts with those parties that presumably have privacy protections and recourse for breaches written into them. I've moved on, as my opinion about these actions is set, but if you want the story of what went on, ask for the privacy impact assessments (or lack thereof) for the data sharing of vaccination data. Further, you can ask for how your consent to vaccination was collected (it wasn't, and there wasn't a way to register that you were being subject to a medical procedure under duress either), and the picture of what the response was becomes clear. Sure, Orban's a hate figure, but he's also a test balloon for how much the Economist and its establishment colleagues want to admit about what they did, and a mirror for calibrating what your own governments almost certainly did as well.