Olivier Tesquet, journalist for "Télérama" specializing in cybersecurity issues, is the guest of "Culture Médias".

He explains why, according to him, the TousAntiCovid application is more useful politically than in health, but also what are the risks of inserting surveillance into a public health policy.

INTERVIEW

Can measures taken in the name of health security lead to more surveillance of citizens by States?

It is a risk, according to

Télérama 

journalist

Olivier Tesquet, specializing in cybersurveillance and cybersecurity issues, who will publish a book on the subject in the spring.

Guest of 

Culture Médias

, he explains how the TousAntiCovid application has first of all a political utility, and the risks it contains if France makes it evolve as some foreign countries have already done.

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Olivier Tesquet downloaded TousAntiCovid on his own phone, in order to understand how the application worked.

"The first use I find in it is the ease of generating certificates. I think a lot of people have downloaded it for this reason," he said.

And that's what causes him problem.

"From the start, and this is also the case in other countries, these applications have not shown that they have a significant impact on the virus and its rate of reproduction", explains Olivier Tesquet.

Arguments that are more emotional than rational

"They are much more tools of political communication than tools of health policy", he thinks.

The journalist takes as proof the fact that the government, when it speaks of TousAntiCovid, only communicates on the number of downloads.

The usefulness of the application in reducing the circulation of the virus is never emphasized.

Even if Olivier Tesquet recognizes that this utility depends on the number of users. 

According to Olivier Tesquet the effectiveness of TousAntiCovid has never been the main argument for its acceptance.

"When Cédric O, secretary of state for digital, came to defend in the hemicycle the former StopCovid, which was already widely debated among parliamentarians, he had summoned Pasteur, Concorde, the French genius," recalls the journalist.

"We can see that we were in the emotional register, completely irrational. We cared little about whether or not it was going to roll back the virus or not." 

Singapore, an example to be avoided

Beyond the question of effectiveness, Olivier Tesquet warns about the vigilance that citizens must have towards the developments of TousAntiCovid.

"I often take the example of Singapore. Singapore is, a priori, a territory that lends itself particularly to this type of application," he says.

"It's a city-state, a kind of city of the future, clad with sensors, with a very, very high rate of electronic equipment. However, the optional application he had deployed was not enough to avoid containment. "

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Today, Singapore "which is sometimes a tempting authoritarian regime", according to the journalist, is in the process of making its application compulsory.

"Now you have the obligation to scan a QR code before entering a building," says Olivier Tesquet.

"We no longer ask you if you agree or not, and you really state your identity. We can thus see the somewhat slippery slope on which an application like TousAntiCovid can lead us, of which I have little doubt that it has good initial intentions. ".