Privacy is privacy. I ideally don’t want any of my data sold to anyone, but health data is even more vulnerable.
In my country it was even a big deal when they allowed different doctors to access your health data via a common system, as there were e.g. concerns that the information recorded by one doctor might bias another doctor, so some felt that it should be your choice what data to share between different parts of the public health system (except for explicit referrals).
Moreover, most European countries do have private doctors, private hospitals, and private health insurance – it’s just way less used than the public system. Those would have the same concerns as in the US.
Can't speak for all Europeans, but in my neck of the wood, Germany, they do very much.
You can be discriminated against a job based on health records. Scary diseases like AIDS and TB make it hard for unskilled labor to land a job since it's so easy to discriminate. Pregnancy history may hurt women who are in countries with more generous maternity leave.
Mental health history will hurt just about everyone - who wants a worker who can claim ADHD, depression, anxiety, etc as reasons to be unproductive?
Then people will simply deny getting diagnosed for fear that they may uncover something that puts their jobs at risk. That hurts the medical system as a whole.
Combine with weird stuff like eugenics. What if we identify a possible rapist gene and neuter them in advance? Or bar people with a klepto gene from working in finance? You may live in happy, sane, democratic societies today, but it may not be the case 30 years from now.
Just to make this clear, probably EU-wide, you can't legally be discriminated against. However, it's gonna be hard to prove leaked data won't be illegally integrated in e.g. ATS models, or was attributed as skill issue when it popped up during manual background checks.
Although, infectious disease like HIV or dystopian scenarios like eugenics are probably the classical discrimination examples for these privacy implications, I don't think they are very likely to be discriminated against (outside of jobs where discrimination is legal and require disclosure anyway, e.g. health workers, food industry etc.). It's easy to dismiss those worries, since most people aren't affected. But common issues with mental health (e.g. depression), hidden disabilities and chronic disease (e.g. PMS), or potentially severe recurring disease (e.g. cancer) realistically are going to be much more impactful. Everything which statistically increases chances to fall out the work force due to health reasons - especially in combination with strong labor protections.
I think this has been something people have had an instinct about forever, and the only reason I had to threaten to quit was because of a misunderstanding of the level of data safety involved; put simply it was not common knowledge that socket connections could be snooped and that targeting a popular service would be easy for a malicious person to do. (This was before SSL was efficient or easy to manage, and in the days when only payment screens were encrypted).
Once the message was across, everyone's objectives were aligned again.
Health information is deeply private because disease is entangled with shame/weakness/vulnerability/taboo/intimacy.
Of course there is no way for me to know if the poster was trolling or pushing an agenda. Some other commenters in this whole comment section are more obvious to identify
Do Europeans care if their private and personal data is secret or not? What kind of question is that?
I received my daughter's ASD diagnosis via Zivver. This included very personal details about her life. No parent would want that to be public. For adults it is worse: they become vulnerable to extortion, and Mossad is known to go very far for the cause.
You still wouldn't necessarily want a life insurance company to know stuff they haven't formally asked to know, you still have health information that could be used to blackmail you or whose reveal would be humiliating or upsetting.