Paris (AFP)

The development for May 11 of the StopCovid application, which should allow to trace contacts with people diagnosed positive for coronavirus, constitutes "a challenge", underlines Sunday the Secretary of State for Digital Cedric O.

"The goal is to be ready by May 11, but it's a challenge" because "there are still several technical issues to be resolved" and "we will not compromise on safety", says Cedric O in an interview in the Journal du Dimanche.

The Secretary of State ensures that this application, which will use Bluetooth technology, will be "voluntary, anonymous, transparent and temporary". "The state has no access to any identifying data and there will be no geolocation".

"The installation of the application must be completely free consent," insists Cedric O again. "In the arbitration between health constraints and individual freedoms, we pushed thoroughly towards individual freedoms," he argues.

He proposed setting up a "monitoring and transparency committee, composed of NGOs, legal and digital professionals, parliamentarians".

The system will be "a brick in the health survey system which is at the heart of deconfinement, in order to prevent the epidemic from starting again," he continues.

In practice, the system will record, via Bluetooth technology, the contacts of the owners of telephones having downloaded the application, "by notifying you when one of them has been diagnosed positive", explains the Secretary of State . This "will make it possible to detect certain cases of transmission poorly covered by traditional surveys, such as contacts in public transport".

Cedric O underlines that "all the industrialists involved are French", indicating that "the most involved are Capgemini, Dassault Systèmes, Orange and two start-ups, Lunabee studio and Withings".

Development is carried out in conjunction with the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, Inserm (National Institute for Health and Medical Research), the Pasteur Institute and the National Agency for Systems Security. 'information.

"It is a question of health and technological sovereignty", says Cedric O, for whom it is up to the State "alone to define health policy" and "to decide on the algorithm which defines a contact case", without therefore use the platforms offered by Google or Apple.

The Secretary of State adds that he is in discussion with the latter, because the application does not run correctly on the iPhone and smartphones of this manufacturer, even if they only represent 20% of the French fleet, he said. .

For Cédric O., "what epidemiologists say is that there is no minimum threshold of downloads necessary for this application to be useful."

© 2020 AFP