Paris (AFP)

A few months after leaving the presidency of Qwant, which he had founded, Eric Leandri wants to bounce back by offering internet users new privacy protection services.

The projects are expected to "come out in a month or two," Leandri told AFP.

Without giving details, Éric Leandri indicates that he no longer participates in the daily activity of Qwant, the French search engine which does not keep the memory of the searches of its Internet users and which has its own algorithms.

He left the head of the company in January, which was to be refinanced, and is now satisfied to sit on the company's board of directors - of which he remains one of the main shareholders.

His new projects will be done outside of Qwant, in a new structure of which we only know the name, AltRnativ.

They will remain in the furrow he had dug with Qwant, that of the protection of privacy and sovereignty in the face of major international players.

It will be "bring services that protect you on your phone and your daily use of the internet," he explains.

"It will be through plug-ins (small additional programs) in your browser, perhaps applications on your phone," he said.

"Why trace people" when they go to an e-commerce site or that of their bank, when they could "evolve in a secure network of trust?", He asks.

Pending the completion of these projects, Éric Leandri is participating with Baptiste Robert (aka Elliot Alderson on Twitter), a renowned expert in computer security, in the fight against StopCovid, the contact tracing application prepared by the government.

With his ally, he urges the public authorities to abandon this project, which is too dangerous for the respect of privacy, and to promote other technologies such as that known as "cell broadcast", a system of public alerts by SMS targeted to a given geographic area.

When the alert is activated, telephones in the geographic area "receive it by SMS as soon as they + limit + (connect) to an antenna" in this area, explains Eric Leandri.

For example, if a case of coronavirus is declared in a given village or geographical area, all the inhabitants can receive an alert SMS, inviting them to take additional precautions, even to confine themselves or to be tested.

The SMS could also for example give instructions for the test, fixing for example a place and a time, explains Éric Leandri.

- "No one is judge and party" -

According to a European directive, France must have installed before 2022 an emergency alert system "based on numbering", such as "cell broadcast".

For Éric Leandri and Baptiste Robert, the system could even be used to warn all the participants in a large gathering in the event of the discovery of contamination of one of them.

An SMS could easily be sent to all phones that have bound to the antenna of the gathering place, they say.

The security of the system comes from the fact that "the telephone operator has the telephone numbers concerned but is not the one who makes the messages", explains Eric Leandri.

Conversely, the person making the messages - the State or other authorized institution - has no knowledge of the telephone numbers concerned.

"Nobody is a judge and a party," he said.

With this system "we use existing infrastructure" and "we do not ask for additional data" from individuals, underlines Baptiste Robert.

Éric Leandri left his post as president of Qwant in January, after a recapitalization of his group by Caisse des Dépôts and the German group Axel Springer.

Qwant, now chaired by former sales and marketing director Jean-Claude Ghinozzi, said in mid-April that he did not share Mr. Leandri's positions against the StopCovid project.

Qwant considered that the French solution "met the most satisfactory conditions as it stood so that temporary development could be envisaged".

© 2020 AFP