French application StopCovid has passed the milestone of one million users

The French contact tracing application against the StopCovid coronavirus "has passed the milestone of one million users," said Secretary of State for Digital Cédric O on RMC on Saturday morning.

The State Secretariat for Digital has told AFP that the figure of one million corresponds to "activations" of the application, and not to simple downloads. The bar was crossed "at 7:30 am this morning," it was said from the same source.

The effectiveness of the smartphone application 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.

But the app is "particularly useful" for people living in urban areas, "who take public transportation and go to bars and restaurants," he said.

StopCovid allows its users to be warned if they have encountered another user infected with coronavirus in the previous two weeks. The alert is triggered if the smartphones of the two people have crossed within a meter, for more than 15 minutes.

When asked if there had ever been cases of users of the application reporting their contamination with the coronavirus, Cédric O referred the communication on this point to the Ministry of Health.

The application is highly criticized by all those who fear that it opens the door to a surveillance company since it consists in keeping track of other users crossed over the last two weeks.

The government stresses for its part that the application does not manage unencrypted identifiers, but pseudonyms which change regularly.

The French government has chosen to entrust the design of the application to French players under the project management of the national computer research institute Inria.

He notably refused to use the customizable platform offered by the American giants Google and Apple, at the risk according to some observers of arriving at a product that is technically unreliable.

The application was launched on Tuesday. Friday evening, she was still at the top of application downloads in France, according to the specialized company AppAnnie.

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