"Alert! You have come across a person infected with Covid-19, please go to the screening drive for immediate test ": will we receive text messages tomorrow on our mobile phones to let us know that we have perhaps contracted the coronavirus and isolate us, if necessary?
This science fiction scenario, the South Koreans, Taiwanese, Chinese and Singaporeans have experienced it on a life-size scale to stem the pandemic. Not without success, but at what cost? France, the country of Enlightenment and Human Rights, can it accept to cut corners on its individual freedoms in the name of the general interest dictated by the "war", according to the presidential term, against disease?
This debate, abysmal for our western democracies, Emmanuel Macron opened it on Tuesday by setting up a new think tank made up of doctors and researchers, responsible for working on therapeutic trials in progress and what is called backtracking.
"It's not a question of having an extramarital affair!"
The principle: when a person is tested positive for Covid-19, the GPS geolocation data contained in their smartphone is used to trace their movements and determine who they have crossed, in order to warn these “contact” people and ask them to contact them. get tested as soon as possible. Which implies, by the way, to be able to test en masse! The objective: to stop any resumption of the epidemic by killing in the bud the beginnings of "clusters".
This use of new technologies for health purposes has strong supporters. "Taiwan and South Korea are not dictatorships! There is no file because there is no data retention, which is deleted once used to locate the contact persons. There is no problem of medical confidentiality, it is the health authority that manages it. And this can be done on a voluntary basis. This is to identify healthy, highly contagious carriers, not to know if you are having an extramarital affair! Pleads an expert in crisis management, who rejects the idea that it would mean selling your soul to the devil. " It's already the case! Google or Facebook use our data for commercial purposes or to assess traffic jams, for example ”.
What does Emmanuel Macron think? According to close advisers, the head of state is very reserved, anxious not to weaken the pillars of the rule of law. In this regard, he would be concerned to see a thirst for authoritarianism growing in the country, at the risk of throwing basic freedoms into the wind. Reason for which, explains a faithful, he weighed everything before decreeing the confinement, measure already strongly offensive to liberties, and chose to ask the French for a certificate on honor - based on trust - for their rare outings and not a digital “coping”.
"It's Big Brother!" Shout the critics of the tracing.
"This is what differentiates democracies from authoritarian regimes. This is why he decided not to use article 16 of the Constitution ( Editor's note: full powers ) ”, explains the same. In the background, it is the specter of a coming to power of extremes that worries him, he who remains convinced that he will face Marine Le Pen, and no other, in 2022.
"It's Big Brother!" Exclaim the detractors of GPS tracking, in reference to the 1984 novel by George Orwell on a future under totalitarian surveillance. What about such sensitive health data? "It would be unjustified to yield at this stage to the pressures of those who wish to further infringe on our individual freedoms by the use of the personal data of our fellow citizens," warns MEP LREM Stéphane Séjourné, who was Macron's political advisor at the Elysée Palace and work on a report on artificial intelligence.
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Member of the Assembly's Law Commission, deputy LREM Sacha Houlié is also upset: “There is a paradoxical injunction. In calm times, there is talk of dictatorship and general surveillance. And there, there is a call for the restriction of freedoms! We would like to blow up all the guarantees of the rule of law ... "Under cover of anonymity, a member of the Council of State, guarantor of liberties, rings the tocsin, worried:" Let us beware of the petainization of minds! "
PODCAST. Emmanuel Macron and the coronavirus crisis: in the head of the president (episode 2)
