July 27, 2024
in 2016, Monsanto asked Fleishman-Hillard to build a poWer map. They produce a poWer map using Power Point. This Power Point was hacked and the French newspaper Le Monde published the information.
This article is a case study about the use of personal data. It does not prejudge the values of the company poWer SAS or its founders.
On 9th May2019, the reporter Luc Bronner published in France an article about a complaint made by the newspaper Le Monde regarding the publication of several documents containing data related to some public personalities and their opinions on glyphosate.
On 31stAugust 2019, Le Monde published an article containing a Power Point slide that placed different people on a map according to their opinion on glyphosate.
We used this image published by Le Monde but we chose to hide the names, which were also blurred by the newspaper in their article. The full document counts 200 names, mostly journalists (more than half of the people mentioned) and public personalities from different areas (politics, science, trade unions). Even though Le Monde blurred the names, we could easily read the exact names of the people mentioned in the article.
This slide is nothing more than a poWer map (“carte d’influence” in French).
In this article by Le Monde, we can read that "The Penal Code prohibits the creation of any personal database containingthe political and philosophical opinions of a person without his or her consent".
This story has been related a lot in the French news, and when we started digging on this topic, rather than tackling the validity or the ethical aspects of this poWer map, we started to wonder whether this poWer map was legal and compliant with GDPR.
This story involves several companies:
· Monsanto,who asked the firm Fleishman-Hillard to build an influence map about glyphosate in 2016
· Fleishman-Hillard, the lobbying & PR firm hired by Monsanto to produce this document
· Publicis who created this document with Fleishman-Hillard (you can notice that on the slide, Publicis’ logo appears and not Fleishman Hillard’s)
· Le Monde who got hold of the document (because it was “leaked” within Fleishman Hillard) and wrote these articles
· France 2 who also gold hold of the document
To help you guess who will be the great loser in this story,, here is an extract of theGDPR regulation (which you canalso access here):
. Theprocessing of personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin (editor's note:the document contains photographs), political opinions, religious orphilosophical beliefs or trade union membership[...] is prohibited.
. Paragraph 1 (editor's note: above) shall not apply if[...] the processingrelates to personal data which are clearly made public by the person.
Be very careful when you are producing poWer map with a Power Point or another tools. A poWer point includes personal data and information. You must consider risks. They can be very high depending of the kind of analysis you are dealing with.
