Secretary of State for Digital, Cédric O, announced Tuesday that StopCovid, the mobile application for tracking Covid-19 cases, will be deployed from the beginning of June. "Development time is progressing relatively well," he said in an interview with BFM Business.
"We will enter the test phase next week, that is to say that we will reproduce real situations to verify that the application works well," detailed the member of the government, citing as pitfall to avoid too much number of notifications.
Entering the test phase would allow, according to him, “if the Prime Minister and the conference of the presidents of the assemblies decide, to ensure that we can come back to the parliamentarians […] in the week of May 25 to consider a deployment during the second phase of deconfinement from June 2 ”.
Apple and Google, "big bad wolves"
The application project was not part of the deconfinement plan, presented last week by Edouard Philippe. He is criticized for the threats he would pose to the protection of privacy. On April 26, the Cnil (National Data Protection Commission) asked for "certain additional guarantees". "The Cnil will also have to be able to reproach itself as it was announced," explains Cédric O, Tuesday.
The Secretary of State also explained why France has not joined other European countries: "There is indeed the solution proposed by Apple and Google which, in our opinion, pose a certain number of problems in terms of protection of privacy and in terms of interconnection with the healthcare system. "
And to add: "It is for these problems, not because Apple and Google are big bad wolves, that we refused to go through their solutions. "
