The read.csv() function also has the argument dec the sets the character used as the decimal separator. By default it is ".". You can either use
people <- read.csv(file="data_people.csv", sep = ";", dec = ",")
or you can use
people <- read.csv2(file="data_people.csv")
The read.csv2() function has the defaults of dec = "," and sep = ";", settings commonly used in locales where the commas is the decimal separator, I believe. Note I dropped header = TRUE because that is the default in both cases. It does not do any harm to include it if you want to.