Amazon and the vaccination plan: Ignoring transparency

By Nikos Giannopoulos

«To support the applications, the appropriate infrastructure of computing resources and services will also be set up on Amazon's AWS Cloud platform.».

With this paragraph on page 15 of the National Operational Plan for Covid-19 vaccination, the Greek government announces, without much formality it is true, its cooperation with Amazon on the vaccination part.

You may wonder what's so strange? As far as the news is concerned, there is indeed nothing strange. The “strange” has happened well before the news was made public and has to do with the selection of the company in question, as of February 2020, and the precise definition of its cooperation with the Greek government.

First of all, it should be stressed that nowhere does it appear that Amazon's choice for the vaccination part of the project was based on any competitive procedure and even though the Minister of State responsible had publicly committed himself to this Gregory Zarifopoulos who had stressed that “which company in the market, from the big technological giants, or a combination of them, will take over the projects of the State, I can not tell you as there will be a competitive process for the award of the project”. Unless vaccination is not a public sector project.

Secondly, between February and December, a lot of water flowed down the drain. So in the meantime it became known that Amazon is being formally investigated by the Commission for competition issues. Publications even in the Greek press (Kathimerini) in November, explained to us that Commission accuses “the trading giant of violating EU competition rules, citing the company's dual role as both a platform for the wholesale sale of products to independent traders and as a retailer of the same products”. Does the Greek government and the relevant ministries know this?; And if so, have they taken this into account?;

But there is another very serious dimension that has to do with the issue of personal data. Amazon is controlled on USA because it seems that its customers' data were passed on to third parties for the purpose of profiting from their exploitation. As rightly pointed out in the last paragraph of the relevant publication, the company has a responsibility towards its customers to comply with the legislation on personal data, even if specific employees have committed the violation.

And here once again the question arises: Is the Greek government aware of this? And also: Is the Data Protection Authority aware of this?; Amazon, through its involvement in the vaccination project, will have access to very sensitive data of millions of Greek citizens. Shouldn't someone be concerned about this?;

On the face of it, however, no one in charge seems to be worried. Cooperation continues uninterrupted and indeed Amazon is also associated with the Palantir. The latest software “running” on Amazon's cloud, the platform on which, as we saw at the beginning of the text, “the appropriate infrastructure of computing resources and services on the Cloud platform will be set up, including in particular the conduct of stress tests to evaluate the infrastructure” (the business case for vaccination).

However, as one can understand, the general digital transformation (to which 20% of the total amount of the Recovery Fund will be directed) of the country is too serious a matter to be “run” without absolute transparency, especially since there are specific investigation procedures underway (including by the Commission), which highlights the issue of incompatibility of Amazon's practices with the European legal framework.