The TousAntiCovid smartphone application, which had a difficult start, is today "
a priori the most downloaded French application in history
," said Secretary of State for Digital Cédric O on Friday. .
Read also Behind the scenes of TousAntiCovid
"
Today, there are a little less than 50 million
connected phones or watches" that have TousAntiCovid, said the Secretary of State, adding that "
it is a priori the most downloaded French application of history
”.
Specifically, it is the most downloaded French application in France, as French gaming applications have enjoyed great success around the world.
In addition, due to the outbreak of virus contamination observed at this time, "
there are today every day 50,000 people who receive
" on the application "
a notification to say that they are in contact
", added the secretary of state.
TousAntiCovid, which was originally designed to alert its users when they recently ran into another user infected with the virus, has come under heavy criticism since its launch.
A timid launch
In fact, the application only really took off when it became the backbone of several individual tools to deal with the pandemic: production of travel certificates during containment, national and regional daily statistics to realize changes in contamination and the degree of saturation of intensive care units, and more recently a health pass storage tool.
Some experts have criticized it in particular for its insufficient effectiveness in terms of contact tracing, many people realizing a posteriori that they have come across infected people without the application notifying them.
Some also saw in it the beginnings of a surveillance society, since the application allows to keep in memory the people crossed recently.
The government has always argued that even if the application "
missed
" many potentially contaminating encounters, those it detected were still very useful in the fight against the epidemic.
Read alsoCovid-19: Should we stop testing?
On the possibility of surveillance, the government is putting forward mechanisms to anonymize contacts and avoid it being possible to trace all the meetings of a given person.