TousAntiCovid was the most downloaded French application of 2021, and not in history, corrected Secretary of State for Digital Cédric O on Friday evening, returning to comments made in the morning. The application wanted by the government to help in the fight against the coronavirus responsible for Covis-19 “was the most downloaded free application of 2021” on the application stores of Apple and Google / Android, indicated Mr. O in a statement sent to AFP, adding that it was a “historic success”. Friday morning, on France Info TV, the Secretary of State explained that there was today “a little less than 50 million phones or watches” connected which have TousAntiCovid. “It is a priori the most downloaded French application in history,” he added.
Insufficient effectiveness in contact tracing
TousAntiCovid, originally designed to alert its users when they recently ran into another user infected with the virus, has come under heavy criticism since its launch. In fact, the application only really took off when it became the backbone of several individual tools to deal with the pandemic: production of travel certificates during containment, national and regional daily statistics to realize the evolution of contaminations and the degree of saturation of the intensive care units, and more recently a tool for storing the health pass. Some experts have criticized it in particular for its insufficient effectiveness in tracing contacts, many people realizing a posteriori that they have come across infected people without the application notifying them.
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Some also saw in it the beginnings of a surveillance society, since the application allows to keep in memory the people crossed recently. The government has always argued that, even if the app “missed” many potentially contaminating encounters, the ones it detected were still very useful in the fight against the epidemic. On the possibility of surveillance, the government is putting forward mechanisms to anonymize contacts and prevent it from being possible to trace all the meetings of a given person.
According to figures given by Cédric O on France Info TV, the outbreak of virus contaminations observed at the moment has increased the number of individual alerts sent by the application. “Today there are 50,000 people every day who receive” on the application “a notification to say that they are in contact,” said the Secretary of State.
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