Corona pandemic
Luca users can share vaccination status with health authorities
In the future, users of the Luca app will be able to voluntarily share their own vaccination status with their responsible health department. Photo: Christoph Soeder / dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
It promises the end of the paper mess, but data protectionists continue to be a thorn in the side of the Luca app. Now the developers are stepping up – with an encrypted chat with the health authorities.
In the future, users of the Luca app will be able to voluntarily share their own vaccination status with their responsible health department.
With a new version, the application has been expanded to include an encrypted chat function, which can be used to exchange personalized direct messages between health authorities and users.
This “Luca Connect” function will be activated in December, announced Patrick Hennig, Managing Director of Culture4Life GmbH, on Tuesday in Berlin. For the chat function, the Luca makers rely on encryption technology that is also used by the Signal messenger service.
App criticized by privacy advocates
The Luca app aims to replace the mess of paper that arises from analogue recording of visits to restaurants, exhibitions and other events. However, the application has been sharply criticized by data protection activists and numerous security researchers for months. You interfere with the central data storage and consider the app to be ineffective. The Luca skeptics also include individual representatives from health authorities, for example in Berlin-Neukölln.
Luca contradicts these allegations and refers to his encryption concept, which was developed among others with the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied and Integrated Security (AISEC).
With “Luca Connect”, health authorities could use the voluntarily stored data to analyze risks more quickly and differentiate them and then individually inform people at risk via direct messages, explained Henning. The data provided by the users – names, telephone numbers and 2G status – could only be decrypted and analyzed by the responsible health department in the region.
Cost of 20 million euros
According to Culture4Life, more than 40 million people in Germany have registered with the Luca system. The system is financed through license agreements with 13 federal states. The costs for this added up to around 20 million euros this year. The Luca makers are currently trying to extend the annual licenses with the federal states. They expire at the end of March 2022.
Luca critics such as the Chaos Computer Club are calling on the federal states not to extend the contracts and instead use the federal government’s Corona Warning App (CWA). However, the health authorities are not involved in the anonymous recording of contacts with the CWA. Proponents such as the health authorities in Hamburg and Nuremberg, on the other hand, see the Luca app as a useful addition to the CWA.