Doctolib acquires Start-up Tanker to secure universal health data

Doctolib announced Friday, January 21, that it has acquired Start-up Tanker, an end-to-end crypto company. The transaction amount was not disclosed.

Doctolib was already using the technology
The two companies know each other really well. In fact, the telemedicine company has been using Tanker technology since 2019 to encrypt the health data of its users from end to end. “The acquisition of Tanker is the logical development of our relationship and we can be proud that this technology still exists in Europe, while the world’s tech leaders have it on their radar.said Stanislas Kneux-Chateau, President and Co-Founder of Doctolib.

Thus, this union does not disturb the work of Doctolib tools that will continue to “Spreadconveyor technologyOn a larger scale“To date, Doctolib has 60 million individual users and 30,000 health professional users in France, Germany and Italia, the country in which it purchased its competitor. On the other hand, Doctolib does not specify a list of data that does or does not benefit from end-to-end encryption.

Tanker was founded in 2015 by Guillaume Pontallier, Clément Ravouna and Cédric Gestes. It provides developers with an end-to-end encryption solution that is embeddable as an SDK. It is implemented directly in the SaaS application code. “The personal health data of patients using Doctolib can only be accessed by patients and health professionals in all circumstancesDoctolip explained during a previous presentation. In other words, only the people who are communicating – the healthcare professional and his patient – can read the messages exchanged.

Health data security strategy
This acquisition is part of the context of the growing interest in personal data security by Doctolib. He received two certifications last November, one on information systems security and one on health data hosting.

This strategy also responds to accusations of data protection by the tricolor unicorn. In June 2021, he was accused of using two cookies in order to collect German users’ data, such as the medical specialty, treatment and sector (public or private) required as well as the IP address of the device used for research. These were then ported to Facebook and Outbrain, two advertising giants.

In response, Unicorn confirmed that it did not collect health data using these cookies and added that it contains “jNever send medical data to a third party, whether in France or GermanyIt claimed that it sought users’ consent, as required by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Disputed over data hosting by AWS
In France, Doctolib has been accused of poor protection of user data because Amazon – as a host – and the company itself will have access to this information, according to an investigation it published. France Inter Published March 2021. The accusations were dismissed by Stanislas Neukes Chateau, CEO and founder of Doctolib, in a blog post.

The choice of the US cloud provider, in this case Amazon Web Services (AWS), has also been challenged by the physician and patient associations that took over the state board. They felt that the health data was poorly protected because it was hosted by AWS, which is subject, as a company located in United State, to the arbitrary power of the US intelligence services.

The administrative judge rejected this request. He said that the data had been adequately protected thanks to modifications to the hosting contract that set out precise procedures in the event of requests for access by a public authority. He also noted that Doctolib implemented an encryption procedure, designed by Tanker, which only has the Atos key. This would prevent the data from being read by a third party.