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Test scenario when developing the warning app: It is not places that transmit viruses - but people
Photo: Handout / dpa
Data protection endangers human life, this "holy cow" must finally be slaughtered.
This is roughly what prominent politicians, most recently the Bavarian and Baden-Württemberg Prime Ministers, are calling for in connection with the Corona warning app.
I am very surprised at statements like this, which unnecessarily weaken trust in an important component of the fight against pandemics.
Because the steep thesis is not followed by any concrete and feasible suggestions for improvement.
Rather, I suspect that this debate is intended to divert attention from enforcement deficits in connection with Covid-19.
Why should it be necessary to dispense with data protection principles such as necessity, suitability, proportionality or the existence of a transparent legal basis for the processing of personal data in order to fight a pandemic?
And if you had to radically rewrite the current app because a new idea with the interface used by Google and Apple cannot be technically implemented, you would only lose important time in the fight against the pandemic.
No, the blanket restriction of the fundamental right to the protection of personal data will not reduce the number of infections.
Such debates unsettle instead of contributing to the goal.
I would like to draw attention from the talk show slogans to what is sensible and feasible: More than 22 million people have installed the corona warning app on their mobile phones and are making a growing contribution to containing the pandemic.
The point now is that this contribution can be made even bigger, for example through the automatic detection of potential infection clusters by the Robert Koch Institute and the health authorities.
There are specific and quickly implementable suggestions that work without data protection law.
It is not places that transmit viruses - but people
The corona warning app was deliberately not developed as a geo-tracking app, and there was never this suggestion.
Its purpose was and is to warn people quickly that an infection could pass on.
What is the added value of the information whether I have met an infected person in the supermarket or in the bookstore?
It is not places that transmit viruses - but people.
And the contact no longer needs to be warned, it is the person who tested positive who warned me.
If you really want to overwhelm the health department with your GPS data instead of providing specific contacts, you can use one of dozens of apps that record them.
A real problem to be solved is that so far only around 60 percent of app users have also used their positive test result in the app to warn their contacts.
That is exactly the point of the app.
So all measures to increase this share are important.
But this is not a question of data protection.
The pandemic shows one thing: Corona control measures are successful if a sufficiently large part of the population accepts them and is voluntarily prepared to temporarily restrict their way of life and everyday life for the benefit of the community.
Data protection creates exactly this trust in the measures that we need to achieve our common goal: to protect people.
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