Keeping a professional secret

French criminal law does not protect the information. It punishes the person who was entrusted with it, by status or by profession, with a year in prison and a fine. That is the whole difference between secrecy and security. A system is configured to withhold data and it withholds it, until an instruction, a bug or a subpoena changes the configuration, and then it hands everything over without having decided anything. A person holding a secret can be asked, pressed, offered money and refuse, and the law counts on that refusal enough to make the alternative a crime. Confidences are told to machines now, in volume and at every hour, and they are safer there in some ways. Nobody in that arrangement is keeping anything.