France Travail: the government creates a mega social data file which worries the CNIL

The law called “For full employment” promulgated in December 2023 plans to significantly change certain missions of the public establishment responsible for employment, previously called Pôle Emploi and now France Travail.

For example, at the beginning of January 2025, all active solidarity income (RSA) recipients and young people under 25 registered with a local mission are preparing to be registered at the establishment.

The government published, on 1^is January 2025 the decree which allows France Travail to modify its information system to adapt it to its new missions. This text adds six processing operations of personal data allowing the organization to store and share with its “partners” sometimes sensitive personal data, such as medical data.

In the text of this decree, the Ministry of Labor justifies the use of this data by mentioning six processing purposes. The data must serve new missions such as the management of the RSA and the activity bonus. But they must also give it new means to fight against fraud and manage the classic missions inherited from Pôle Emploi. France Travail will also accumulate data to allow transmissions between the organization and the National Family Allowance Fund, the evaluation of the partial activity system created by the law and the inclusion platform.

Medical, economic and financial data… and even the prison situation

In the data that will be collected by the France Travail Information System, information concerning the RSA, the activity bonus, as well as data relating to the particular difficulties encountered in accessing employment, education, training path and level of qualification and diplomas as well as skills or even “reading abilities”.

But the decree also allows France Travail to collect and process data such as the Allowance for Disabled Adults (AAH), the state of health of job seekers, but also identification and nationality data. and residence permit, economic and financial, tax, banking data, prison situation, data relating to the personal training account, data relating to guardianship, curatorship or family authorization measures, those relating to diagnosis, contacts of the person in charge of legal protection, data relating to family situation or the type and origin of the disability. And we have not made an exhaustive list of personal data that France Travail can now collect.

The wording of the document specifies most of the time (11 times in the text) that this data can be recorded “ to the extent that they are necessary for the pursuit of the purposes » provided for by law. The decree provides that France Travail can keep certain data for 6, 10, or even 20 years in certain cases.

The CNIL did not have time to seriously study the decree

In accordance with the law, the government asked the CNIL for its opinion on its draft decree and published it at the same time. He cannot therefore be blamed for not having consulted it. But in its opinion, the CNIL explains that it did not have time to seriously study the file.

This opinion also begins with this warning: “aWith regard to the conditions of referral and in particular the deadlines left for its analysis, the opinion of the CNIL and the absence of observation on its part on certain provisions of the draft decree cannot prejudge the legality of all of the treatments concerned “. The CNIL explains that it had an emergency period of one month to respond with, in addition, a transmission of a corrective referral and elements “ transmitted over water ” Who ” total more than a thousand pages of documents ».