The development for May 11 of the application "StopCovid", which should allow to trace contacts with people diagnosed positive for coronavirus, constitutes "a challenge", underlines Sunday the Secretary of State for Digital Cédric O. " The goal is to be ready by May 11, but it's a challenge ", because" there are still several technical problems to be resolved "and" we will not compromise on security ", says Cédric O in an interview in the Sunday Journal .
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"There will be no geolocation"
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 Cédric O. "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.
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Bluetooth technology used
In practice, the system will record, via Bluetooth technology, the contacts of the phone owners who downloaded the application, "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".
Development takes place in conjunction with the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, Inserm, the Pasteur Institute and the National Agency for Information Systems Security. "It is a question of health and technological sovereignty", affirms Cédric 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.