The StopCovid app has lead in the wing. While the Germans decided to work on Google and Apple. The French plan must be announced tomorrow ... And it will never be ready for May 11.
Parliament is due to debate tomorrow the StopCovid app, which is supposed to alert when a person has been in contact with carriers of the virus. But the project is off to a bad start ...
Yes and it is very unfortunate because suddenly the app will not be ready before the end of May, so well after the start of deconfinement. And even if we can have doubts about the very effectiveness of such an app, it is a tool that we would be wrong to deprive ourselves of. Only here, a coalition of skeptics or even technophobes, well represented in the Assembly, including in the majority, is coming up. The app 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…
Yes, because in the French project, the app must store the data on a central, national server. It's been a bit "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 are saying that they don't want the data collected on the phones to be transmitted to a centralized base. But we need the two American giants for the app 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 you want an app that works to fight the disease, you have to be pragmatic…