Coronavirus and digital tracing in France: "safeguards are needed"

For the Minister of the Interior, there is no doubt: if an application helps to fight against the Covid-19 pandemic in France by signaling to smartphone owners that they have been near a patient , you have to use it.

Asked Sunday April 5 on France 2, Christophe Castaner said that "all available intelligence is necessary and will be used". "Tracking is part of the solutions that have been adopted by a certain number of countries so we have chosen to work in conjunction with them to look at these solutions," he added. "I am convinced that if they make it possible to fight against the virus and if, obviously, they respect our individual freedoms, it is a tool that will be retained and supported by all French people. "

🔴 Tracing of the French: "If the solution makes it possible to fight against the virus and if it respects our individual freedoms, it is a tool that will be retained"

Christophe Castaner is the guest of # JT20h # covid19 # confinementjour20 pic.twitter.com/uZxUDcwr8G

Telephone operators have the ability to track each user. And in order to fight against the spread of the coronavirus, such a tracking application would allow citizens to be informed if they have been, during their travels, near a patient of Covid-19, in order to be test in stride.

Several countries, such as China, Taiwan and South Korea, collect GPS information from their citizens' phones to locate infected people and enforce containment measures. This effective practice is problematic, however: such data collection is prohibited within the European Union due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a text that governs the processing of personal data.

Singapore taken as an example

In France, it is therefore another technology that could be used. "Besides geolocation via 4G terminals or via GPS, Bluetooth, which we use to connect our phone to headphones for example, is emerging as a solution for countries concerned about respecting individual freedoms, because it is a technology that does not reveal your location, "explains Gérôme Billois, cybersecurity specialist at Wavestone, contacted by France 24.

This process is used by the Singapore government for its TraceTogether application. Phones equipped with the application connect to each other within a radius of a few meters, allowing the application to identify possible patients nearby, then send an alert if necessary. Each telephone also keeps in memory the list of crossed telephones for twenty-one days. Thus, when a user becomes ill and enters their health status in the application, an alert is then sent to all of the registered users to encourage them to be tested.

Singapore is now being emulated. France and several other European countries seem convinced that this tool could allow them to stop the pandemic. A European project, called Pan-European Privacy Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT) and with which the National Institute for Digital Research (Inria) is associated, has thus been set up to offer a guide to good practices to follow for a privacy-friendly digital tracing.

"The avenues currently being studied by the PEPP-PT are interesting, but there is not yet a model precise enough to rule on the guarantee of respect for private life," said Anne-Sophie Simpere of Amnesty, however. International France, which closely monitors the development of citizen tracking technologies. "However, the conditions to be respected for such an application to see the light of day are clear: it must be provided for in law with a very limited objective, strictly linked to the fight against the epidemic; it must also be proven that the measures taken are necessary, proportionate, and above all, limited in time; finally, there must be adequate control mechanisms with possibilities of appeal. "

"Any data collection can be problematic"

For Gérôme Billois, even an application that only uses Bluetooth to collect data can present dangers with respect to the privacy of users: "It is nevertheless an application that could potentially allow, in a totalitarian regime, to track an opponent and find out who he meets. So a number of safeguards are needed. "

>> Read: Symptoms, transmission, double infection: what we know about Covid-19

"Any data collection can be problematic, adds Anne-Sophie Simpere. This is an area where a priori tiny flaws can lead to human rights violations. Once the systems are in place, governments can be tempted to keep them for another use. So you need very specific rules right from the start, including consent. "

This last question is not resolved at present. The Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, had evoked, on April 1, a "voluntary engagement" at the time of its hearing in the National assembly by the mission of information on the management of the epidemic of coronavirus. But the Minister of the Interior, Christophe Castaner, did not rule out compulsory digital tracing. "I can't tell you," he said on Monday, April 6, on Franceinfo, when he was asked the question of volunteering for citizens.

The question remains open, because the effectiveness of such an application depends directly on the number of users. The more there are, the more useful and efficient the application becomes. However, in Singapore, where the penetration rate of the smartphone is higher than that of France, "about 10% of the population installed the application", according to Charles-Pierre Astolfi, secretary general of the National Digital Council ( CNNum), interviewed by Mediapart. A figure that seems too low to fight against the Covid-19 and which could therefore encourage the government, despite the political risk of such a measure, to make the collection of this data mandatory.

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