French Prime Minister Jean Castex said that a new version of the StopCovid application will be presented on October 22 to support contact tracing systems, the equivalent of Immuni for Italy. StopCovid was launched at the beginning of last June, but with results well below expectations. Castex himself, during an interview last month that was much criticized, had admitted that he had not downloaded it.
StopCovid has been available in France since 2 June, works via Bluetooth technology and is used on a voluntary basis: it tracks contacts that occurred less than a meter away and for at least 15 minutes in the two weeks prior to any contagion. StopCovid is based on a “centralized” model, in which some data is processed by a central server. It is therefore incompatible with most of the apps of other European countries, which using the programming systems (API) made available since last April by Apple and Google are instead based on a decentralized system: the data collected by the apps remain on the phones of the users, with minimal use of a central server. According to several experts, this solution better guarantees the protection of privacy.
In April, most of the governments of Europe that were developing centralized apps decided to change the system, after the intervention of Apple and Google: Italy, Germany, Spain and others did. The United Kingdom and France instead decided to remain faithful to their project, continuing to develop their app: in the name of what has been called “digital sovereignty” and because a centralized system, albeit less respectful of citizens' privacy, gives governments have more data to analyze to extract potentially useful information (the UK then changed its mind again, launching its app with Apple and Google APIs three to four months later than other European governments).
StopCovid was designed by French companies and national bodies including Inria, the French Research Institute for Digital Science and Technology; the country's main telephone operator, Orange SA; the software company Dassault Systèmes.
Contact tracking applications are proving useful, albeit still limited and dependent on the amount of downloads. So far, however, StopCovid data are below expectations, as several government officials have admitted. The French app has been downloaded by around 2.6 million people, or just over 3 percent of the population. In the UK, NHS Covid-19, launched on 24 September, was downloaded 12.4 million times in four days and is now at 16 million. In Germany, the Corona-Warn-App (despite some problems) was downloaded 18 million times. Immuni has been downloaded in Italy by more than 8 million people.
Things to know about the coronavirus The newsletter of the Coronavirus Post updates you on the latest news: it's free and arrives every Thursday at 18:00. To receive it, write your email address here and press the button below. Having read the information, I agree to send the Newsletter Most of the StopCovid downloads had occurred in June, with a very slow progression in the following months (+20k in August and +60k in September). So far – the data is from last week – 472 notifications of potential cases of contagion have been sent, after 7,969 people had declared themselves positive on the app. In addition, the application had been uninstalled by more than a million users at the end of September. On September 15, the Committee responsible for the application had declared that several thousand people had downloaded the app but had not activated it.
These results, again according to the Committee, have various explanations. The application was launched in June “at a time when the epidemic seemed contained”. According to some, the launch would then have happened in a confusing way: announced in the morning and then at noon, the StopCovid application was put online on Google Play after 4pm and on the Apple Store after 8pm. users have mistakenly downloaded Stop Covid19 Cat, a Catalan application with a similar name. The launch and dissemination of the application were not the subject of an effective communication campaign by the government.
The introduction and approval of StopCovid then met with a lot of resistance – and with very strong tones – not only among the opposition parties, but also within the government majority itself. Finally, the National Commission for Informatics and Freedoms (CNIL, the French Guarantor) had expressed some doubts on the application, asking for corrections and a series of guarantees, and stating only last September 4th that the gaps had been filled. All this may have affected the confidence of citizens and townspeople in the app. Cédric O, the French secretary of state for digital transition, said the differences between StopCovid numbers and other apps have nothing to do with the apps themselves and how they work, but “probably with our cultural differences and with the different attitudes towards the coronavirus “.
There is not much news on the new version of StopCovid for now: some newspapers write that it could change its name, that the activation of the alert could take from 15 to 5 minutes with the contact, which should be more interactive and be accompanied by a ' important communication campaign. It should remain on a voluntary basis and continue to follow a centralized model, though. However, none of this news has been confirmed. Cédric O last October 8 said that to relaunch the application and make it effective, allies must be found: he cited doctors, restaurateurs, trade unions and transport authorities.
