Group of researchers says grave dangers lurk in post-lockdown surveillance
France is preparing to roll out digital tracking and tracing as part of plans to end its coronavirus lockdown, but computer scientists have warned that unanswered privacy questions remain.
The French government wants to launch a tracking application for mobile phones called StopCovid as part of its bid to resume normal life after almost two months of mandatory confinement. Contact-tracing apps similar to this one have been used to reopen cities and regions in China and Singapore.
Government technology adviser Aymeril Hoang said the application would use Bluetooth technology to track when a user had been in the presence of another user suspected of being infected with the disease.
Last week, in response to the announcement, a group of computer scientists launched a website called “Anonymous tracking—a dangerous oxymoron”. On the site, the scientists voiced alarm, saying that the data in the app could potentially be de-anonymised and used for purposes that would curtail users’ privacy.
Anne Canteaut, a cryptography specialist at France’s National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) and member of the group, said that expert voices on the matter needed to be heard.
“It is very difficult for the government and most of the parliamentarians to understand exactly what the concrete nature of problems is,” she told Research Professional News. “[This is] because identifying these problems requires precise technical expertise in computer security.”
The researchers who form the group are primarily from Inria, but also the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the Sorbonne University, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EFPL) and Canada’s University of Waterloo.
Canteaut said she hoped their intervention would help politicians understand the implications of tracking for private life.
“We hope that other experts will analyse the benefits of tracing in slowing of the epidemic, and from there, the political powers will be able to judge whether its deployment is appropriate,” she said.
France’s data protection watchdog CNIL also issued a statement, highlighting that “unprecedented questions” remained on the issue of privacy.
Last month, EU bodies expressed concerns about digital surveillance and coronavirus. On 19 March, the EU’s committee of data protection regulators, the European Data Protection Board, said governments would need to legislate in a proportionate manner when it comes to tracking apps. Without legislation, the board said, any moves to make such apps compulsory would be in breach of the 2002 ePrivacy Directive.
But France’s ad-hoc Covid-19 Scientific Council issued a statement on 20 April, saying that “digital tools” were an essential part of plans to “reach all residents of the national territory, even those who do not have a smartphone”. Secretary of state for the digital sector, Cédric O, told the French senate that the StopCovid app was “a French tool, in accordance with our values and laws”, and that it would respect “individual freedoms”.
The French parliament passed the application’s use on 28 April.