French voting app sparks concerns over data protection ahead of election
A new French app called Elyze that matches users with the presidential candidate offering a programme most similar to their own ideals has been in the spotlight over growing ethical concerns.
The application has been downloaded over 1.2 million times in just over two weeks and has risen to the top of the download charts in the country.
Presented as a Tinder for politics, Elyze (a play on the word Elysée, the official residence of the President) asks users questions about subjects such as the environment, economy, and education sector. The app uses the information to indicate which candidate most aligns with the user's views in the upcoming April election.
The creators of the app have said that the goal of Elyze is to fight low turnout and voter abstention among younger people.
A recent Ifop poll revealed that 59% of 18-30-year-olds do not plan to vote in the first round of the upcoming election.
Due to some technical bugs, the app has fuelled numerous conspiracy theories online. One of the issues that users brought up was that the current President Emmanuel Macron was placed first even if he tied with multiple other candidates.
This has raised questions about who was behind the app and whether it is politically biased. The founders of the app released a statement saying that this was a technical bug that is being fixed.
“Neutrality is our driving force, no candidate benefits from any preferential treatment,” the app's team tweeted.
But there are also fears over the ethical aspect of the data that the app stores and how it uses it. The users can choose whether Elyze collects data on them such as their gender, postal code and previous voting preferences.
But this sort of information can be enough to say a lot about where and how
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