German Bundestag, Plenarprotokoll 20/98, pp.
11855-11856.
Frau President. Right honorable colleagues.
Data are the essential currency of the digital age. This
platitude is meanwhile – we have heard it – even overtaken by the Linke. In
regards today’s data track which oneself each time again lays down and by means
of which one is coordinated with others, the term “resource” instead of “currency”
is actually more correct and therefrom also derives this term of data mining.
Is this discipline now a curse or a blessing, good for the
individual or only for the powerful, for the economy or for the state, for the well
founded or only for the dull witted? Generally, it is scarcely to be thus answered.
And thus also data mining in a medical connection is first dealt with predominantly
in the named comprehensive report. Certainly it applies to emphasizing the
enormous potential uses and for that reason the theme is initially very well
suited for an exemplary assay.
Legally, we are not in completely unknown territory.
Informational self-determination, creators’ rights, performance protective
rights or rights of ownership, also in businesses, ultimately have bundled data
as raw material for a theme. Therein also can now already be set out without
problem an additional level of rights. Here in the future needs to be more
precisely defined how dependence of this raw material on the further processing
level is to be legally defined. Unusual in any case is the circumstance of
non-consumption. Once used primary data certainly does not vanish just because
secondary data is derived from it.
I want to again make clear both endpoints of the
fundamentally scarcely comprehensible evaluation chain. Initially there is a
concrete information, on occasion in direct reference to an individual, or
traceable, and quite at the end there is a recommended action or acknowledgment
on the basis of an inquiry from a many times processed global data product. In
between, any refining stage is imaginable, the designation “data mining” itself
thus actually still much too briefly
grasped.
For long is neglected that private businesses here tend to
completely hurry away from state actors, at least when over-bearing autocrats
in the health area repeatedly present a special case. As with every
technological upheaval, both failures of over-regulation on one side and wild
growth on the other are in any case to be avoided. When however I look at the
Corona policy of first the Merkel government and now that of the Ampel, this bad tutelage, the future in
regards health data becomes for me one of angst and alarm; that, I need really
say.
At least the avoidance of personal back reference [Rückbezug] is, yes, hopefully
self-evident. Transparency and anonymity are also important, although only
relevant rather early in the refining process. The avoidance of monopolization
also becomes important at every level. For that, actually drawing up a public
law body would at least be presentable, as long as this itself then did not again
act as a bottleneck. Derived data products in the health area however then need,
again please, to be accessible to private law ownership.
Data mining needs to be retrospectively, objectively subject
to scrutiny, quite precisely. An ideological forward control, as you so gladly
always do it, is on the contrary to be strictly rejected. Statistical data can
indeed be based on incomplete realities. Data sets are nonetheless never
therein guilty, rather the respective realities.
Finish-refined data sets [Fertigraffinierte Datensätze] are thereby in regards to a more
precise consideration a purely ethical, absolutely sterile product which would
also open up enormous opportunities beyond political trench warfare. Whether
you acknowledge that and really want it, I however do not believe.
Many thanks.
[trans: tem]
