StopCovid's “million user milestone” was crossed this Saturday morning, said Secretary of State for Digital Cédric O on RMC. His services then told AFP that this corresponded to "activations" of the contact tracking application, and not just downloads. Which would suggest that there are more than a million of them.
The bar was crossed precisely "at 07:30 this morning", four and a half days after the launch of the application, Tuesday afternoon. During the first 24 hours, 600,000 people had already downloaded it.
"We have no specific objective"
Its effectiveness depends on the number of people who use it, even if the government considers it useful "from the first downloads". "We have no specific objective" in terms of the number of users, said Cédric O on Saturday morning.
PODCAST. StopCovid: why the coronavirus tracking application arrives so late
On May 25, in Le Figaro, he nonetheless estimated that “from 10% of people who use it in a living area, it (the application, editor's note) has a systemic effectiveness in reducing the diffusion of the epidemic ”. The application is "particularly useful" for people living in urban areas, "who take public transport and go to bars and restaurants", he also stressed this Saturday.
Fears regarding individual freedoms
The principle of StopCovid is simple: the system is notified when one of its users tests positive for Covid-19. The others who met him within a meter and for more than fifteen minutes during the previous fifteen days are then warned and encouraged to be tested in their turn. This Saturday, Cédric O was unable to say if there had already been cases of users of the application reporting their contamination.
The application works with Bluetooth technology, not with geolocation. However, it is widely criticized by many elected representatives or personalities from civil society who are concerned about the risks it poses for individual freedoms and privacy. The government had decided to go through with its own project, without going through the platform proposed by the American giants Google and Apple.
