So that if a donor is diagnosed with an infectious disease you have to throw away all blood in the centre? There are good reasons to track the provenance of blood.
No, but you will have to throw away all blood products from that donor and you will have to pass the message back to the collection point so they can alert the donor.
So yes, you need to be able to track the provenance of the blood but the final recipient of the product should not have the ability to contact the donor directly, nor should the donor have knowledge of when and/or where their blood was used.
This can all be done without having a phone number or other identifiable data attached to the blood product other than a serial number which goes back to the collection point.
Centralizing this data is a very dangerous thing and could have un-intended consequences for the donors.
The blood bags doesn't show the donor's phone number, it has a bar code on it with a serial number. My guess is that when they remove the bag from stock, they scan the bag and a text message gets sent from some server. The recipient have no way of knowing where the blood came from unless they have access to the database, which of course they don't. The blood donor doesn't know who got the blood, only that it's been used.
- your blood contains your DNA, so you not only give out something to help others, you also give out your biological finger-print
- insurance companies might use lab results + identifying info to deny insurance
- your blood contains information on your heritage
And I'm sure there are many more examples like that.
Maybe I'm over-sensitive to data collected for no particular purpose but NL has a pretty bad record when it comes to this sort of thing and in fact people have died because of the innocent collection of something as mundane as religious affiliation.
All reasonable concerns, but your identity is connected to blood donations anyway in many places anyway, not least because of disease management as discussed above. If any bad actors in the scenarios you describe want access to your DNA and you are int he habit of donating blood, it's trivially easy for them to get it anyway. In the US you have to give your name, show ID, and give your SSN to donate blood (at least to he Red Cross), so any idea you had of anonymity is already long gone. I don't feel like researching it on a country-by-country basis right now but I don't think that IDing yourself is exceptional.
The only new thing I'm seeing here is that you get a text message when your donation is used, and it's in that context I'm saying it's a good thing. I can't donate blood in the US (have spent too much of my life in Europe, so it's possible my blood is too socialist) but I wouldn't have had any expectation of privacy if I did so beyond normal confidentiality laws.
> your blood contains your DNA, so you not only give out something to help others, you also give out your biological finger-print
Anyone who wants your DNA is going to have an easier time stealing it from your coffee cup in the garbage than a blood bank.
> insurance companies might use lab results + identifying info to deny insurance
Insurance companies in the US are no longer allowed to deny coverage for preexisting conditions under the ACA, and are already generally entitled to review your lab results as part of your contract with them.
> your blood contains information on your heritage
It's not centralized, just tracked. If you want centralized, there's a biobank in Stockholm that contains tissue samples from everyone born in Sweden since 1975.
