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The French government has launched a programme aimed at reducing the health service’s reliance on software provided by US technology company Microsoft, in a significant shift driven by concerns over digital sovereignty and foreign control of critical infrastructure.

Central to the issue is the Plateforme des données de santé (PDS), a digital platform which, since its creation in 2019, has been hosted on Microsoft Azure, despite reservations expressed by France’s data protection authority, the CNIL.

The PDS contains records of almost every electronic interaction within the French health service. Security specialists say information that could identify patients or healthcare professionals has been removed, with the data retained in anonymised form to support medical research.

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Opposition to entrusting such a sensitive system to a US company has been a recurring theme in French political debate, focusing on the implications of placing critical infrastructure under foreign legal and political control.

The issue has gained prominence amid wider geopolitical tensions, including during the second presidency of Donald Trump and under US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Particular concern followed US sanctions imposed on judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which intensified European debate over the vulnerability of public institutions reliant on large US technology providers.

US legislation such as the Cloud Act and provisions under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has further reinforced fears that US authorities could compel disclosure of data held by American cloud providers, even when stored in Europe.

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Digital sovereignty concerns are not limited to health data. The European Parliament has replaced Google with the French search engine Qwant on thousands of internal systems, although Qwant itself has faced criticism for reliance on Microsoft’s Bing infrastructure.

In France, similar concerns extend to government communication systems. The secure messaging platform Tchap, used by ministers and civil servants, was recently compromised after a hacker gained control of a user account. The Direction interministérielle du Numérique (DINUM) said no stored messages were accessed.

The government has also promoted adoption of the French-developed encrypted messaging app Olvid as an alternative to US-owned platforms such as WhatsApp, although uptake remains limited.

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