It was a campaign promise. The government has decided to actively fight against digital insecurity. Presented as a “everyday subject, of public order”, “completely suited for the 100 days” of Emmanuel Macron’s revival, a digital bill will be discussed in the Council of Ministers in the week of 1 st May 2023.
This new law should fight against the ever more numerous and sophisticated scams. In March 2023, according to Service-Publique, the finding was clear: “For the past few years, digital insecurity has been progressing. In 2022, 15% of French people admit to having been victims of a scam (UFC-Que Choisir Barometer).”
With the law of March 3, 2022, the State had already provided for the establishment of a “Cyber-Score”, a kind of Nutri-Score for websites. The cybersecurity certification issued by the State should be implemented in October 2023. According to Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister Delegate for Digital, “for the most visited sites, it is a question of having an indicator that goes from green to red and which specifies to the Internet user if the personal data or the payment data that he will deposit on this site are well secured”, reports TF1.
This time, the State wishes to test several digital security devices from the start of the 2023 school year. The start of the examination of this new bill is scheduled for the beginning of June 2023 in the Senate, then in July in the National Assembly. What’s in this digital security bill?
The law of June 24, 2020, known as the “Avia law”, laid the foundations for the fight against hateful content on the internet. The law provided for the creation of a “special prosecutor’s office in online hate messages” as well as an “online hate observatory”, attached to the CSA.
The law should also include a penalty of banning the use of social networks for a fixed period in the event of a conviction for cyberbullying. But this proposal had been rejected in 2020 by the Constitutional Council which highlighted the question of public freedoms.
With the 2023 digital security bill, the government wishes to update this proposal. Concretely, in addition to a fine or prison sentence, a cyberstalker would be banned from social networks for a given period. In addition to this new penalty, the government wants to set up a “scam filter”: what is it?
Jean-Noël Barrot, Minister Delegate for Digital, had already spoken about it in February 2023 on FranceInfo: the digital bill should lead to the creation of an “anti-scam filter”. The purpose of this filter is to warn the user, on computer or smartphone, when he goes to a website considered fraudulent or dangerous. According to TF1, the device would be installed by default on digital devices and could be deactivated manually.
The government should test this filter during the Rugby World Cup next September before it is generalized for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games. To be continued.