Paris:France Televisions has decided to cancel its collaboration with an Israeli company for developing an interactive platform for a political program due to concerns about data handling, reports indicate.

According to Anadolu Agency, the French public broadcaster initially intended to partner with Terrific, an Israeli e-commerce specialist, to create a platform named Agora. This platform was meant to support the relaunch of France 2's political program, L'heure de verite, allowing viewers to interact by sending questions to presidential candidates and participating in real-time polls.

Mediapart, the French investigative outlet, reported that the project raised concerns over potential data collection from users of the France Televisions' Franceinfo website. There were apprehensions that user data, particularly political preferences, could be recorded.

Terrific's CEO, Israel Grintz, co-founded a company in 2018 that provides tools for political campaign targeting. Despite this expertise, France Televisions chose to abandon working with Terrific on the project.

France Televisions informed Mediapart that while Terrific had proposed a system for public interaction in television programs, their internal tests did not yield satisfactory results, leading to the decision to assign the task to their own technical teams.

Additionally, Mediapart highlighted concerns regarding another Terrific-developed tool, Shoppable, which was removed from the France.tv platform after reports of phishing risks and personal data issues were flagged by users' antivirus software. The tool was found to be collecting data that could help create user profiles, including unique identifiers and URLs of pages visited.