Paris (AFP)
The French StopCovid contact tracking application is available for download in the Google Play application store, AFP noted at around 4:00 p.m. Tuesday.
The publication on the Apple application store should follow quickly, it was said in the entourage of the State Secretariat for Digital Cédric O.
Availability was initially expected around noon and the delay on this application, much criticized in principle, led to a lot of sarcastic comments on Twitter.
It also led an application by the Catalan government, Stop Covid 19 CAT, to be at the top of downloads in France on Tuesday on the Apple application store, ahead of Zoom, TikTok and WhatsApp, according to a ranking established by the specialized company AppAnnie. They were probably Internet users confusing the two applications.
StopCovid must allow its users to be warned if they have recently encountered, within a meter and for more than 15 minutes, another user who has been found to be contaminated by the coronavirus responsible for Covid-19.
The application is criticized by computer experts and lawyers, who see it as a first step towards a surveillance society where our actions and gestures are permanently traced by automatic systems.
The government argues for its part that it was the only way to warn people potentially contaminated in all circumstances where a patient cannot identify all the people with whom he had close contact: neighbors in public transport by example.
StopCovid was developed under the direction of the French IT research institute Inria with the help of developers from private companies such as Orange and Capgemini.
The application is built on a different architecture from the contact tracking platform offered by Google and Apple, and therefore did not benefit from the cooperation of the two American giants.
© 2020 AFP