Paris (AFP)
France is working on the development of a smartphone application, usable "on a voluntary basis" to identify people who have been in contact with a person infected with the coronavirus, said the Minister of Health Olivier Véran and the Secretary of State Cédric O.
In an interview published in Le Monde on Wednesday, the two men intend to clear the very sensitive subject of "tracking" - this technique of trying to identify all the recent contacts of an infected person - because of its implications for individual freedoms and privacy.
This project, called "StopCovid", aims to "develop an application that could limit the spread of the virus by identifying chains of transmission", explains Cédric O. "The idea would be to warn people who have been in contact with a sick person tested positive in order to be able to be tested yourself, and if necessary to be taken care of very early, or to be confined. "
"No decision is made" on a possible deployment of this application on which the National Research Institute in Computer Science and Automation (Inria) has been working for several days, assure the two men.
"We only work on the assumption of a voluntary installation of the application" which can be "uninstalled at any time", says Cédric O, adding that it would be based on Bluetooth technology, which allows our smartphones identify nearby devices (headphones, speakers, printers ...). and not the collection of geolocation data.
"The application will not geotag people. It will retrace the history of social relations that took place in the previous days, without allowing any outside consultation, or transmitting any data," he explains. "When two people meet for a certain period, and at a close distance, the mobile phone of one records the references of the other in its history. If a positive case is declared, those who will have been in contact with this no one is notified automatically. "
According to Olivier Véran, it is "compatible with European personal data law, with anonymized data". "No one will have access to the list of contaminated people, and it will be impossible to know who contaminated whom. The computer code will be public" and the National Commission for Data Protection (Cnil) is "closely" associated with works.
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