The astonishing reconversion of the ex-boss of Qwant and “champion of privacy”

Qwantthe privacy-friendly French search engine, largely ignored once out of government, has not had the expected success at all.

So, according to an article by Politico, his ex-boss Eric Leandri has built a flourishing career dedicated to destroying all the principles he stood for when he ran the company. The one who presented himself as an ardent defender of privacy now works hand in hand with arms dealers in the sale of cyber surveillance instruments for authoritarian governments.

Went in two years from private life crusader to chief overseer

It was in 2011 that Leandri began to make a name for himself. He then co-founded Qwant, a search engine that wants to be sovereign and is intended to compete with the American giants in this area, Google in the lead. With a clear difference in philosophy: Leandri puts the defense of user privacy at the top of its priorities whenever possible. The man seems to know what he is doing, and in any case succeeds in convincing the public authorities: in 11 years, his company receives more than 50 million euros in French and European public money.

In early 2020, Qwant also becomes the official search engine for French administrations. But these serious boosts are not enough and the company now accumulates 80 million euros in debt, for an annual income of less than 12 million. And its technology, still not perfected, is still largely based on the services of Bing, yet theoretically a competitor.

Leandri leaves the company in 2020, in disgrace. He then created Altrnativ, a company in the sector, but which is located on the other side of the spectrum compared to what he had defended until then. We are indeed talking here about cybersurveillance, and its clients are just as much large French companies as certain totalitarian regimes on the African continent.

Altrnativ, the invention of open source espionage

Despite all the help from which Qwant was able to benefit, the step was perhaps a little too high. So Leandri succeeded in proving otherwise that French Tech could be exported internationally. Because in barely two years of existence, Altrnativ has managed to find a place for itself and its list of clients is as long as it is varied. Leandri presents the services of his company as open source surveys, that is to say from information freely accessible on the Internet. Using massive data collection and sorting platforms, it can thus define the profiles of thousands of people (same operation as for targeted advertising, but this time for a much more dangerous purpose). The icing on the cake, the process obviously does not respect, for the users concerned, the GDPR.

But this last point only applies to European Altrnativ customers. Because if the company does not lack it (monitoring of critics Bernard Arnault and LVMH, trade unionists of Lesieur, employees of the shipowner Naval Group, or even of the Dassault Group), its activities go beyond the borders of the Old Continent. The documents obtained by Politico show that the group has thus provided solutions to the governments of Chad, Benin, Congo, or even the Comoros, allowing them to spy on their opponents in many ways. What happens to them next is not Leandri’s problem. This article cannot return to all the information revealed by Politico, but Alternativ’s services were sometimes associated with contracts made with genuine arms dealers, and Leandri did not hesitate to recruit former senior French officials to extend his influence in Africa. He will at least have succeeded in proving the correctness and the necessity of the fight he once waged.

Source : Politico