ROAD CONTROL. From November 1, 2021, GPS guidance and driving assistance apps will be required, in certain circumstances, to no longer report the presence of law enforcement to their users.
44%. It is, according to the interior ministry, the percentage of deaths linked to alcohol or drug use in road accidents. In an attempt to fight against this scourge, but also in specific situations such as kidnapping alerts or terrorist attacks, the State may, from 1er next November, require collaborative GPS navigation applications (such as Waze, Coyote, TomTom, Garmin, Michelin TravelPartner or Glob) to hide, that is to say no longer signal to their users, the presence of security forces. ‘order or police checks within a given perimeter and for a limited time. The objective is to bring into play the effect of surprise so that the people concerned (sometimes users of GPS applications) cannot precisely avoid any checks put in place by the police. In practice, according to decree 2021-468 published in the Official Journal of April 20, 2021 and which supplements article L130-11 of the Highway Code, this request for a ban on reporting will take the form of an order. It can only come from two public authorities: the Ministry of the Interior and the Prefect. “on the proposal of the officers or agents of the judicial police and the deputy judicial police officers of the national gendarmerie and the national police”.
These exceptional provisions will apply, depending on the case, for a period which may range from 2 hours (for alcohol and narcotics checks) to 12 hours (in the case of searches for individuals in connection with a “kidnapping alert” or a terrorist attack). Likewise, these measures will be circumscribed and cannot concern, even temporarily, the whole of the territory. “The lanes or portions of lanes concerned may not extend beyond a radius of ten kilometers around the road control point when the latter is located outside the built-up area and beyond two kilometers around the road control point when it is located in a built-up area “, specifies thearticle L130-11 of the Highway Code. In the event of non-compliance with the prohibitions decided either by the prefect or by the Ministry of the Interior, those responsible for GPS applications will be liable. 2 years’ imprisonment and a fine of 30,000 euros. Note however, users of services such as Waze, Coyote, TomTom or Garmin will not risk anything and will be able to continue to report the presence of the police. But, in the end, the information will not be transmitted to the user community, as is the case in normal times. GPS applications usually help to make traffic flow more smoothly. However, with the implementation of these reporting bans, they could lose their appeal in the eyes of users who sometimes like to flirt with the red line, that is to say, drive at high speed, under the influence of drugs and / or evade police checks. Opposed to this new legal framework and certainly anticipating negative repercussions on its activity, the GPS Coyote application has recently, as revealed by the NextInpact website, filed a request with the Council of State to request the annulment of the decree published last spring.