The French government has been forced to delay the vote in the National Assembly on its coronavirus mobile tracing app, StopCovid, following privacy concerns.
The aim of the app is to enable each user who tests positive for the virus to warn all other app users they has come in contact with in the past two weeks.
The country’s digital Minister Cedric O told the assembly that the public and private partners brought together to design the phone app remained mobilised “to be ready on 11 May”, when France starts to gradually ease lockdown measures.
Prime minister Edouard Philippe said that he has not yet given up on the project, but that questions relating to civil liberties “seem to be well-founded” and “must be debated”.
The idea that smartphones can keep the memory of all other smartphones they’ve crossed paths with raised major privacy issues when implemented in practice. Advocacy organisations have questioned the ability of anyone to give “free and informed” consent to the implications of such tracking.
“It is difficult to warn the person who shared your metro train at 7:46 a.m. on line 12. You don’t know him, he doesn’t know you, and the RATP [i.e. Autonomous Parisian Transport Administration] knows none of you”, Philippe explained.
“When the application under development is up and running and before its implementation, we will hold a specific debate, followed by a specific vote”, he said.
