The StopCovid project-team and the ecosystem of contributors are working together to develop a mobile contact tracing app for France

The French government has entrusted Inria with the operational management of the research and development project called "StopCovid", which brings together the expertise of national players, both public and private, within the StopCovid project team. All these players are contributing to the work already under way to provide all French citizens with a tool to better protect them against Covid-19.

Sharing the guidelines set by the Government, the project is based on five foundations:

• The use of the StopCovid app as part of the global strategy for managing the health crisis and epidemiological monitoring. StopCovid project is an additional brick that provides public health actors with a decision-making support for the deconfinement phase.
• Strict compliance with the data protection and privacy framework at national and European level, as defined in particular by French law and the RGPD, as well as the toolbox recently defined by the European Commission on proximity monitoring applications.
• Transparency, which notably involves the dissemination, under an open source license, of the specific work carried out within the framework of the project. This is in order to provide all the guarantees in terms of controls by society: transparency of algorithms, open code, interoperability, auditability, security and reversibility of the solutions. Thus, this solution could offer basic building blocks that can be used by all countries that wish to use them.
• Respect for the principles of digital sovereignty of the public health system: control of health choices by French and European society, protection and structuring of health data assets to guide the response to the epidemic and accelerate medical research.
• The temporary nature of the project, whose lifespan will correspond, if deployed, to the duration of the management of the Covid-19 epidemic. 

The project, in its prototype construction phase, involves public and private organisations acting on a pro bono basis, as part of the StopCovid project team.

At European level, the project is also being carried out in close cooperation with national teams developing comparable applications in Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Spain and Norway, based on comparable approaches and ensuring interoperability.

Alongside them, the entire ecosystem of research, innovation and companies is mobilized through the "ecosystem of StopCovid contributors". Open, it brings together organizations or individuals who have shown their willingness to participate in the project, either through spontaneous contributions or in response to requests, whether through participation in technical expert groups, think tanks, provision of open source code, sharing of feedback on comparable solutions, or participation in field experiments.

Inria has taken responsibility for the StopCovid project. In these exceptional times for our Nation, France can count on its ecosystem of research, innovation and companies to carry out projects at the crossroads of the necessary effectiveness of health policies, respect for individual freedoms and the maintenance or even strengthening of our technological and digital sovereignty.

                                                                                                                       Bruno Sportisse, Inria CEO