German state minister wants to use corona app for criminal investigation
The Justice Minister of the German state of Brandenburg wants the Public Prosecution Service to be allowed to use contact details from the Luca app as evidence in the prosecution of serious crimes. Luca is a corona app intended for location registration.
Prosecutors and courts should decide on a case-by-case basis whether data from the Luca app can be used as evidence in investigations, said Brandenburg Justice Minister Susanne Hoffmann.
This should only be the case when prosecuting serious crimes, not about minor offences. She cited as an example a “violent confrontation that ends in a murder” or a “rape in a restaurant”, according to the German website Golem. She made her statements in a state legal committee and the state attorney general would also agree.
She would have received support from one party, but resistance from other parties in the committee. For example, the party chairman of BVB/Freie Wähler called the plan “unacceptable in a liberal constitutional state”, because the corona app is intended for tracing contacts of contamination chains and the data should only be used for that purpose.
It is not the first time that the Luca app has been discredited in Germany for improper use. In January, it became known that the Mainz police had illegally requested data from the app. The further use of Luca is now under discussion. The state of Rheinland-Pfalz is already saying goodbye to the app, according to the German newspaper Die Zeit.
Update, 16.35: Luca is not directly comparable to CoronaCheck, as initially stated in the article. It is an app from the company culture4life that is used in several federal states for registering visitors at locations. The aim is to trace contacts in corona cases and to be able to trace possible contamination chains. Due to the focus on locations, it works differently from the German Corona-Warn app, which tracks based on contacts in close proximity, just like CoronaCheck. Last year, the Chaos Computer Club called for an immediate stop with the “million dollar” app because of “the dubious business model, faulty software and irregularities in the award of contracts”. Thanks to, among other things, rope grab.