The controversies accumulate around the Elyze application.Launched on January 2, it aims to motivate the undecided to vote in the presidential election via their affinities with this or that candidate.Even if the concept immediately found its audience (the app is currently second in the classification of free apps in the App Store), some technical concerns quickly pointed out.If the first software versions can accommodate bugs, they can be very problematic in a political application.

Created by students, the application has the ambition to reconcile young people with the policy to limit abstention.In practice, Elyze takes up the concept of the "pile of swiper cards" popularized by Tinder.The user must sweep cards presenting the proposals of candidates, he can pronounce "for" or "against" by dragging them to the right or on the left.He also has the opportunity not to decide in the face of a proposal.As it responds, the APP algorithm will draw a profile and display the candidates most in tune with its opinions.

If the idea is good, users quickly found several bugs promoting certain candidates.A few days ago, if we accepted all the displayed proposals, the App necessarily put Emmanuel Macron Premier of the podium, followed by Anne Hidalgo and Yannick Jadot.The origin of the problem is simple: each candidate has an identifier ranging from 1 to 15, and for lack of results, the algorithm used it to make the classification.

The bug has been resolved and candidates are now classified in alphabetical order, but history has discredited the application.Engineer Mathis Hammel put his hands in the citch and interested in the Elyze code.He discovered other more disturbing concerns: by hacking a little, he managed to modify certain proposals visible by all.

"Permissions were poorly configured.Everything that touched on candidates was authorized in reading and writing, in particular the function allowing to add or modify a proposal ... "he explains.A flaw that could have been used for political manipulation purposes, but which was quickly corrected once.

The engineer believes that the other parts of the database has not been affected.For him, the application code should be made open source to more easily detect such problems.The two Elyze co -founders added to Le Figaro that "their team is actively working on it to share it as quickly as possible".

Other inconsistencies have been brought up: Emmanuel Macron's proposals date from 2017 (he did not reveal an official program, he did not even declare it) while some candidates have fewer proposals than others,What could have biased the algorithm.This would not yet be to the point, explains Checknews who specifies that the number of proposals is not equal between each candidate for the different themes.Duplicates also existed at launch, which could disrupt the results.

The processing of personal data is also talked about: a security expert has noticed that the program sends information on Amazon (AWS) and Facebook servers."No data is shared with Google and Facebook.The data is anonymous, the application does not individually identify any user, "assured one of the two co-creators of the application to AFP.The second specifies that Elyze was coded with the Expo API, which would automatically send user statistics without it being deactivable.As it stands, the team behind the application therefore seems to have been exceeded by events, as they agreed to BFM:

It is about hurrying to refine their copy: the CNIL wants to check if the application is in accordance with the GDPR.Indeed, respect for it is essential for software that processes political data.The regulator explained wanting to make "use of his repressive powers" in the event of a problem.The creators have announced that they do not want to sell the data collected by the application (date of birth, gender and department), but rather to work with surveys or think tank institutes.

Update 10 p.m. - The source code of the Elyze application is available in this github deposit.