Must do even better. After a series of checks on the French mobile application Stop Covid, intended to be able to trace back to people who have been in contact with a user who tested positive for Covid-19, the Cnil considers that the second version does not yet fully meet the requirements of the Regulation European Data Protection Act (RGPD) and the Data Protection Act. The French gendarme therefore put the Ministry of Health and Solidarity on notice and gave it a month to rectify the situation.
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First complaint: currently, the two versions of the application coexist. In the initial version of the application, contact history filtering (to keep only users who have been in contact within a meter for at least 15 minutes) is operated at the central server level instead of 'be carried out at the level of the telephone " contrary to what the decree provides ", pointed out the Cnil in a first opinion. Although this point was corrected in the second version, deployed on June 26, " the CNIL requests that the use of this new version be generalized among users ".
2.3 million downloads
Second point to improve: the information given to users. Although “ almost compliant with the requirements of the RGPD ” underlines the CNIL, this information must be completed, concerning both the recipients of this data and the operations for reading the information present in smartphones. The user has the right to refuse these operations, but he must be informed to do so.
Third point: certain information from the subcontracting contract concluded between the Ministry of Health and INRIA is missing, " in particular as regards the obligations " of INRIA, specifies the gendarme. Also incomplete is the impact analysis carried out by the ministry " in particular with regard to data processing carried out for security purposes ".
A formal notice from the CNIL is not a sanction, but a form of warning which takes on even more weight when it is made public. A decision that the gendarme justifies by the number of French people concerned and by the sensitivity of the personal data at stake. The CNIL also hopes to educate all users who have not updated their version of the application.
The StopCovid application has so far not been very successful. Only 2.3 million French people have downloaded it according to the Directorate General of Health, or about 3% of the population, which places France at the bottom of European countries. The reproduction rate of the coronavirus is on the rise again in several regions of France, which could encourage more French people to download StopCovid. For it to be effective, experts recommend that the application be downloaded by at least 20% of the population.
