The Elyze mobile application, which wants to help the French find their candidate for the next presidential election, has communicated a lot in recent hours. Among the main announcements made, we note that of the transition to open source of the tool.
Update January 20, 2022, 4:00 p.m.
Dear readers, dear readers,
We told you this morning, stealthily, that the Elyze application was indeed available on the App Store, but no longer on the Play Store, the Google store. This is still the case, and while we thought it was due to an update not yet accepted by Google, it seems there is another reason. Numerama explains that the application, in its Android version, would have been the victim of several reports (we do not really know how many) for ” misleading statement “. In fact, Google has taken the application offline, the time (or definitely?) to remove all doubts about Elyze, which some accuse of being a manipulation tool. To be continued…
In the space of a few days, Elyze has become a real attraction. The mobile application, the most downloaded in its category in France since the beginning of January (whether on the App Store or the Play Store), is on the rise but suffers from various criticisms, both on the collection and securing user data than on its very mechanism. The creators of the application, brought to light overnight, provided many answers on Wednesday to address the many questions. Elyze is now open source… but not completely either. Explanations.
Elyze, speeding on the highway of mobile applications, wants to reassure
Let us recall in a few words what Elyze is. We are talking here about a mobile application with a revealing name, since it allows its users to better navigate among the myriad of candidates for the presidential election. The tool, which has passed the milestone of one million users, alternately displays proposals to mobile users, and the latter swipe their finger to the right or to the left, depending on whether or not they validate this proposal, a little like the swipe popularized by Tinder. And at the end, Elyze presents you with the candidate who seems to best match your political affinities, based on the proposals that you have been able to accept or reject.
The result provided by the application is one of the problems regularly raised by users, who denounce the fact that in the event of a tie between candidates, the application presented an illogical ranking. The four young friends behind the app (Grégoire, François, Wallerand and Gaspard), who campaign against abstention by young voters, claim to have solved this problem in the next update of the app (and to have added a feature “ ex-aequo”), update validated for iOS but not yet for Android.
Mathis Hammel, known for his skills in development, data science and machine learning, recently found a flaw
in the security of the application, and managed to directly modify a proposal attributed to Emmanuel Macron, in just three short hours. The Elyze team solved the problem the next day and also ensures that it wants to comply with the GDPR, the CNIL having indicated that it wants to look into the case of the application.
The creators commit to a “total deletion of all data collected on the app”, in addition to the transition to open source
With regard to the data precisely, those collected have sparked controversy, the application inviting its users to deliver their date of birth, their postal code and their gender. Its creators indicate that, however, there is a “Skip the step” button which allows users not to fill in these fields. Except that this little button has not so far been as well highlighted as the “Continue” button, which the CNIL should probably not see favorably, like cookies.
Elyze, however, ensures that it has no desire to sell the data collected to anyone, whether it is a private company or a political party. ” We have taken a clear decision, with the aim of dispelling any concerns on this level: that of deleting, purely and simply, all of this data. “, announced the creators of the application on Wednesday, after a first appearance on Hugo Décrypte’s show on Tuesday evening. To ensure this, they advise users to relaunch the application after the next update. “ We have recorded the total deletion of all data collected on the app. This will be effective as of the next update. “, they add.
To go a little further in transparency, Elyze indicates that it has published the code of its application on GitHub, validating its transition to open source. The license has not yet been specified, of course, but we can read in the README file that “ AWS Amplify server configuration files and folders removed from code ”, which tends to prove that the data collected has indeed been deleted, AWS Amplify being used in particular for storage in the Cloud.
Source: Twitter @ElyzeApp
, GitHub
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