While the construction of the vital e-card is about to come to an end, after three years of tests at the local level, the senators acted this summer, in the amending finance bill, a first budget 20 million euros to set up the… biometric Vitale card. A real fad for the right and the extreme right which sets it up as the ultimate solution in the fight against social fraud. Problem: these two different projects do not use the same technology and do not have the same goal. Without any complementarity, how can they then coexist? Why hasn’t the state already chosen one or the other of these two projects, rather than spending millions of euros to develop both?
For Bruno Salgae, former director of studies in the engineering schools of Mines, Bridges and Telecoms, specialist in technologies around health, “the two projects are not stupid, they only respond to two different technological developments”. And if the timing questions, the problems are in fact much older for the expert. “As long as we have significant identifiers and the notion of rights holder who has nothing to do with people, we cannot achieve a global solution with a single card. These are the two key points to be resolved from the beginning”. Nicolas Klein, sociologist of work and organizations at the LATTS laboratory, and author of a comparative study on the Vitale card and the shared medical file in 2020, goes even further. “The potential for the two projects to get in the way is obvious and has already been pointed out”. How then to navigate and explain the imbroglio created?
Two projects, two positions
On the one hand, we have the announced imminent arrival of the Vitale e-card, the first experiments of which were launched in October 2019 in the Alpes Maritimes and the Rhône. It is the dematerialized version in the form of an app of the famous green smart card, born in 1998, and which should gradually be erased to make way for this new data processing process. “But today, only the Orange operator has implemented the Vitale e-card application,” notes Bruno Sagères. Thanks to the Mobile Connect function, only subscribers of this operator will be able to dematerialize their Vitale card”. This project therefore still has limits for all French people to adhere to it.
On the other, on the model of passports or identity cards in France, the Vitale card is about to join the family of biometrics, which allows, thanks to a chip containing in particular fingerprints, to establish an unforgeable link between the holder and the card. It is therefore exclusively nominative. This poses a major problem since in France, the Vitale card is currently legally linked to a group of beneficiaries.
Major problems since its creation
For Bruno Ségales, the problems of today are in fact those of yesterday. It dates back to the genesis of the Vitale card project. “It is the result of an unsuccessful project for a smart bank card, which was nipped in the bud with the arrival of Visa and MasterCard. But to avoid the bankruptcy of the Crédit Agricole, at the origin of this project in the 1980s, and to justify the billions of francs swallowed up, the political decision-makers decided to use it to give birth to the Vitale card. . However, it therefore has all the faults of the bank card which has never seen the light of day: it is not linked to a person but to an account number, we cannot totally control who uses it, not to mention the legal concept of rights holder. “Today, children (until the eve of their 16th birthday) are attached to their parents’ Vitale card”, objects Bruno Sagères.
Among all the faults of this card, the favorite Arlesian of a political fringe, it is fraud. And to fight fraud, nothing better than biometrics. “The biometric card launched by defenders of the fight against social fraud conveys the idea that the latter would be limited to the theft of Vitale cards and falsification for use by others than the beneficiaries. Which is a bias that does not consider the arguments of some of the decision-makers who claim that the main problem is not identity theft but the existence of networks that use legal cards for traffic drugs”. We have never seen a doctor or pharmacist who checks the identity of a person when using his Vitale card.
Flaws remain to launch the biometric Vitale card
But biometrics also encounters a lot of obstacles in France. The most obvious is undoubtedly the legal problem of rights holders, a choice introduced when Social Security was created in 1945, “an error from the design stage” for Bruno Sagères. “If the biometric Vitale card wants to see the light of day one day, it is absolutely necessary to do away with this concept of beneficiary to move on to the notion of person. However, for the moment, the projects are only progressing on the technical level”.
The law should therefore be changed, before even thinking about the technologies to be used. Because for the time being, it is impossible to draw inspiration from what is being done elsewhere, in Asia for example. “In France, you cannot use a PKI key, i.e. a code in which bank data, the possibility of paying for purchases and carrying out all your administrative procedures are collected. Everything is there. This is the case in Malaysia for example. But the law of 1973 Informatique et liberté does not allow it”, explains the former director of study of Mines, Bridges and Telecoms.
Does this mean that the biometric Vitale card has a relatively short expiry date, today called the consumption limit date (DLC)? Given the timing, the Vitale e-card, even if it cannot be generalized for the time being, seems to be largely holding the line. Indeed, analyzes Nicolas Klein, “it seems difficult to imagine that six months, a year or two years after the launch of the e-carte vitale, the State would allow itself to launch the biometric card, given the cost “. The sociologist points to the savings intentions of these two projects, suggesting that the State will not be able to let them develop to the end simultaneously because of the amount of money to be injected into them. So what does “the end of abundance” reason, could the government in a turtleneck then turn off the money tap and make a choice?