Project: Paradise
The Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy supports the Privacy Enhancing and Reliable Anti-Doping Integrated Service Environment (PARADISE) project, that strives to provide relief. Its objective is to protect athletes‘ personal data and simplify anti-doping testing.
The Consortium
- The Fraunhofer Institutes of Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC) and for Applied Information Technology (FIT),
- the Independent Center for Data Protection (ULD),
- the Technische Universität Berlin,
- the brand services firm Gesellschaft für Kommunikation und Kooperation (gekko GmbH), and
- the IT security provider Uniscon
constitute a consortium, whose objective is to enable absolutely precise, dynamic localisation of top athletes and yet, at the same time, to ensure that this is limited to the respective, actually concerned tests only. Before an inspector can access information provided by an athlete, he or she is granted access by two means: via NADA and via athlete authoriziation. In order for athletes to be able to rely on their data’s privacy, „test results are stored via Sealed Cloud „, an infrastructure that technically excludes all access to process data, even by service provider staff, at all times.
What Data Are We Talking About?
Three months prior to matches, e.g. in the event of the Summer Olympics as of May 2016, German athletes are obliged to blog the following information:
- when and where exactly they intend to be
- an exact description of their practice schedule
- a list of all private and official appointments
The objective of PARADISE is to optimize said data in a manner that inspectors can locate athletes quickly and precisely. At the same time, however, access to unreasonable amounts of athlete data by unauthorized third parties should be prevented at all times.
It’s a well-known fact that anti-doping measures and digitalisation make improving privacy imperative! Yet athlete’s constitutional rights to privacy are currently „violated to a degree that exceeds all limits“, says renowned sports lawyer Michael Lehner. In an interview with the daily Die Welt, canoeist Carolin Leonhardt doesn’t mince matters and puts it more bluntly: „It’s quite sick what we have to put up with. You better not be squeamish!“
Wrong! It’s true that athletes can’t bypass anti-doping testing, if we are to ensure clean sports. However, their right to privacy must still be respected and protected despite this at all times!