The corona pandemic relentlessly revealed what the German healthcare system had neglected for decades: digitization. As a deadly virus spread, contacts were traced with fax machines, pen and paper. Then the rapper Smudo appeared at Anne Will and said: “I’m going to the train with Luca, beep, check in, check out. Then I’ll go to the restaurant, beep, beep.”
The Luca app was intended to help bring Germany’s fight against the pandemic into the 21st century. Pull out your cell phone, scan the barcode, off to the restaurant. Practical for users, a huge relief for the overburdened health authorities. They can use it to contact visitors to restaurants, swimming pools or concerts and warn them if a corona outbreak occurs. A success-story?
After almost a year Luca, it looks more like a lesson in activism. “I finally want to have this Luca app, too,” urged the then Mayor of Berlin, Michael Müller, last March. 13 federal states spent almost 22 million euros – and now seem to be changing their minds. In the coming weeks, many contracts with the app operator “Culture4life” will expire, and a number of countries will either opt out or cancel. Luca’s data protection and data security have been criticized from the start, but there are now doubts about the practical use of the app.
10 out of 13 countries have already opted out
Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hesse, Berlin, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein and Bremen have already decided not to use Luca in the future. In Saarland and Brandenburg, the health ministries are against further use. Upon request, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Rhineland-Palatinate, Lower Saxony and Hamburg announced that the final decision was still pending. North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony and Thuringia are the only countries that had not even bought a Luca license.
There are several reasons why one federal state after the other is saying goodbye to the app. The 2G regulation applies in many places, so it is no longer necessary to provide your name, telephone number and address. There are no major events at the moment anyway. In addition, in view of the astronomical number of infections, the health authorities often limit themselves to tracing contacts to vulnerable groups such as residents of nursing homes. However, even before the Omikron variant, the Luca app had, to put it mildly, a mixed usage record.
That showed a survey of mirror. According to Culture4life, 323 health authorities are connected to the Luca app. 54 of them stated that they did not use the app at all. Almost two-thirds of the health departments that point to the mirror– Responded to the request could never have traced an infection chain using Luca data. When asked, the app operator called the numbers “incomplete and not very representative”. In fact, there are also authorities for whom Luca apparently makes their work easier. The health department in Hamburg, for example, was able to use the app to uncover 44 infections among contact persons between May and November.
Chaos Computer Club thinks Luca is dangerous
If you ask the Bavarian health authorities, this impression is confirmed. Some “didn’t actually use the app”, others only a few times. The Augsburg health department, on the other hand, reports that Luca has “improved the quality of the contact lists enormously” and made the tracking of contact persons more efficient. It is also said from the Würzburg district that Luca was helpful. However, the overall balance is sobering: in the past month, 226,049 check-ins were registered via Luca throughout the Free State, but not a single warning was issued. The Bavarian Ministry of Health communicates this on request.
In other words, people who rely on Luca do not receive a warning even if they encounter a risk, because many health authorities no longer work with the system. The Chaos Computer Club therefore considers Luca not only useless, but dangerous. At the weekend, the hackers and IT experts sent e-mails to health authorities. The authorities should publicly call for the Corona-Warn-App (CWA) to be used instead of Luca, which now also enables check-in via QR code. Their warning mechanism works automatically without the cooperation of health authorities. The Luca operator Culture4life therefore does not consider the CWA to be an equivalent replacement. Health authorities would have no way of assessing the risk of an encounter or venue themselves.
In contrast to the CWA, which guarantees complete anonymity, Luca stores personal data on a central server. When the Mainz police illegally accessed Luca data in December, the fears of many data protection officers that this mechanism could be used for other purposes were confirmed. The Federal Commissioner for Data Protection, Ulrich Kelber, is therefore calling on the federal states to switch completely to the CWA. The use of Luca is a “disproportionate encroachment on the fundamental right to informational self-determination”.
New business model to secure the future
Data protectionists and activists are still wondering why politicians even established a private-sector offer to compete with the publicly developed CWA. It is also unclear why the choice fell on Luca. After all, there were a number of other options; more than 30 such providers were organized in the “We for Digitization” alliance. The Chaos Computer Club attributes Luca’s success in politics primarily to clever public relations and Smudo’s charisma, publicly promoting the app. Not entirely without self-interest: The rapper belongs to the group through the Fantastic Capital investment company The fantastic Four 22.91 percent of the operating company.
The Luca makers seem to have suspected that the app could run into difficulties. “We don’t have a post-pandemic business model for Luca,” said Patrick Henning, head of the developer company Nexenio, back in August. It sounds different today: “Luca is preparing for an endemic”, says the author a recent blog entry, in which exactly that is presented: a post-pandemic business model.
Luca cuts prices in half and allows states to sign short-term contracts when needed instead of committing to a year. Health authorities can communicate directly with Luca users. In addition, the operators are specifically aimed at gastronomy and cultural institutions. In the future, organizers should not only be able to check vaccination and test certificates, but also reservations and tickets. The recently introduced function of a digital menu is “just the beginning”.
Distribution with tax money
According to Culture4life, more than 40 million citizens are registered with Luca. Other app developers would pay a lot of money for this enormous spread – in the case of Luca, the federal states paid a large part for this. Nicolai Savaskan, head of the health department in Berlin-Neukölln, considers it “unclean that during the pandemic taxpayers tried to tie the event and catering industry to a paid product”. Now the suspicion has been confirmed that Luca “aligned her business model with this industry from the start”.
The operators reject such allegations. From the beginning, the goal was to enable social life during the pandemic. Users don’t have to worry about their data being turned into money: “The data is earmarked for contact tracing, we can’t do anything else with it and have no access at all.” There is an app that does not generate any personal data that operators or the police could misuse: the Corona-Warn-App.