The French Parliament gives the green light to the StopCovid application. In advisory votes, the National Assembly and the Senate voted for digital tracing on Wednesday May 27, thus allowing the deployment of the application. This should be downloadable from next weekend and will warn people who have been in contact with an individual carrying the Covid-19.
The government's declaration on the application was approved by 338 votes (215 against) in the National Assembly. In the Senate, 186 senators voted for, including a majority of the LR group, 127 voted against and 29 abstained.
These two votes, although without binding value for the government, are a reason for satisfaction for the Secretary of State for Digital Cédric O, on the front line on the subject, while the Prime Minister, absent during the parliamentary debate, appears circumspect. StopCovid "will be useful in the fight against the virus. Our only objective is to save lives," reacted Cédric O after the Senate vote.
In the hemicycle, the members of the government insisted on the importance of this application when approaching a new phase of deconfinement, the main lines of which must be presented on Thursday at 4 p.m. by Édouard Philippe.
Not an "excuse for the state to turn into a police state"
"It is possible that certain" future "decisions will allow the French to find even more individual and collective freedoms and therefore to multiply social contacts", therefore "we need to multiply the tools", defended the Minister of Health , Olivier Véran.
For her part, the Minister of Justice, Nicole Belloubet, insisted on the "voluntary", "anonymous" and "temporary" nature of this application. She also assured that it was not an "excuse for the state to transform into a police state controlling the actions of our fellow citizens".
Intended for holders of smartphones, the application will work via Bluetooth and will not use geolocation. It will alert its users if they have been less than a meter away, for at least fifteen minutes, from a person contaminated by Covid-19.
[#StopCovid] The National Assembly approved the Government's declaration on digital innovations in the fight against the # Covid19 epidemic.
Voters: 574
Majority: 277
For: 338
Against: 215
Abstentions: 21 #DirectAN pic.twitter.com/7CDIIfePKV
An "Orwellian" society
Its detractors, including among others the Human Rights League, point to an attack on privacy and individual freedoms and question its effectiveness, citing the number of people not equipped with a smartphone or unwilling to download it .
On the left, the Insubmissive Jean-Luc Mélenchon led the charge against an "ineffective" and "liberticide" project. "I am one of those who do not want anyone to know who I was less than a meter away, for more than a quarter of an hour," he said. "It's time for a kiss. It's none of your business."
Socialist Cécile Untermaier, for its part, deemed the application "late" and warned against a society of "distrust".
On the right, the leader of the Republicans (LR) Damien Abad, denounced "a stillborn application, which arrives too late" and a "more cautious step" towards an "Orwellian" society.
Support "digital sovereignty"
Sacha Houlié, MP for Vienna, spoke for the few opponents of the project at LREM, referring to the "dangerousness" and the "irreversibility" of this type of tool.
As for the ex-LREM founders of a 9th group in the Assembly, they practically all voted against, except the mathematician Cédric Villani, satisfied with the "safeguards" and wanting to support "digital sovereignty".
Supporters of the application claim that StopCovid received the green light from the National Commission for Data Protection (Cnil), which considered that its recommendations had been followed and that the application allowed " faster alerts ". "Walker" Marie Lebec, MP for the 4th district of Yvelines, also regretted the "instrumentalizations" and "caricatures" of the opposition.
With Reuters and AFP
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