DECRYPTION
A stillborn project? The debate on the StopCovid application, which is supposed to alert when a person has been in contact with a carrier of the coronavirus, is due to start on Tuesday in the National Assembly. But he encountered very strong opposition.
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Critics of privacy
The application will not be ready before the end of May, so well after the start of deconfinement, and a coalition of skeptics and even technophobes, well represented in the Assembly, including in the majority, is indeed coming up.
StopCovid is however developed by a consortium of French companies combining large groups such as Orange, Dassault Systèmes or Cap Gemini but also start-ups. All led by researchers from Inria, a public body. But that doesn't prevent criticism of privacy.
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Data stored on a server?
In the French project, the application must certainly store the data on a central, national server. It's been a little "big brother", but the CNIL has just given the green light. The other option would be for the data to stay on our phones rather than being transferred to a central base. This is what Apple and Google recommend, which do not want the data collected on the phones to be transmitted to a centralized base.
However, we need the two American giants for the application to work and for our phones to communicate with each other by bluetooth. Yesterday, Germany, in the name of efficiency, said yes to American technology and abandoned the idea of a central database. This is the choice that France must now make, if it wants to have an effective application against the disease.