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France has added to the list of countries that use digital technologies in the fight against the spread of coronavirus. According to the publication Le Monde, French specialists are working on creating a StopCovid mobile application designed to track contacts with patients. The application will use Bluetooth to identify the chain of infection and warn the user if he is near a sick person.
Working on the application, the French authorities are striving to protect the confidentiality of citizens' data as much as possible. In particular, they work closely with the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project, whose participants are developing a standard for tracking contacts with COVID-19 carriers, which does not violate European data protection legislation.
However, the application still raises questions from human rights defenders. It is not yet clear whether StopCovid will be centralized, that is, whether user data will be stored in one place. If so, then the data runs the risk of becoming an attractive target for hackers who find it easy to match anonymous identifiers with real names. In addition, as is the case with other similar applications, there is a risk of StopCovid being used by the government for other purposes.
The prototype application will be released in 3-6 weeks - very quickly for such a project. Nevertheless, judging by the rate of infection, a month and a half can be a very long period.
Working on the application, the French authorities are striving to protect the confidentiality of citizens' data as much as possible. In particular, they work closely with the Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing project, whose participants are developing a standard for tracking contacts with COVID-19 carriers, which does not violate European data protection legislation.
However, the application still raises questions from human rights defenders. It is not yet clear whether StopCovid will be centralized, that is, whether user data will be stored in one place. If so, then the data runs the risk of becoming an attractive target for hackers who find it easy to match anonymous identifiers with real names. In addition, as is the case with other similar applications, there is a risk of StopCovid being used by the government for other purposes.
The prototype application will be released in 3-6 weeks - very quickly for such a project. Nevertheless, judging by the rate of infection, a month and a half can be a very long period.