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Luca-Check-In in Bad Nauheim (archive): "We don't give out any data as Luca"
Photo: Ralph Peters / imago images/Ralph Peters
Not only the health authorities are interested in the many contact details that are collected in restaurants and other places during the corona pandemic.
According to a report, public prosecutors and the police have also used personal data from the Luca app or other forms of corona contact recording in more than 100 investigations nationwide since 2020.
This is the result of a survey conducted by the ZDF news portal "heute.de" among all public prosecutors and state data protection officers.
According to this, the data was used in at least five cases, although the Infection Protection Act did not allow this at the time.
In the queries, data was collected from at least 500 people, the number of unreported cases could be significantly higher, according to the report.
According to SPIEGEL information, police officers also contacted health authorities directly to get personal data from Luca users or to inquire about it.
Corresponding inquiries, which were rejected by the authorities, went, for example, to the Vorpommern-Rügen health department in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Südwestpfalz in Pirmasens, Rhineland-Palatinate.
In Freiburg, on the other hand, the criminal police asked the public prosecutor's office whether Luca data could be retrieved for investigations in the event of a sexual offence.
The public prosecutor's office refused, as a spokesman for the authorities told SPIEGEL.
Three requests from other authorities for Luca data ended up at the health department in the Baden-Württemberg district of Ortenaukreis, which were rejected due to data protection.
In one case in Mainz, investigators made use of Luca data from the health department.
In order to find witnesses after a death, the local public prosecutor evaluated data from 21 people from the Luca app.
Luca boss Patrick Hennig condemned such a "data misuse" to SPIEGEL.
The public prosecutor's office in Mainz has since apologized for the procedure.
Persistent topic data query
According to Hennig, the case is a damage to Luca's image, even if, in his opinion, it shows that the Luca system works.
"Because the system is structured in such a way that we as Luca do not even know the personal data and that the investigating authorities cannot easily gain access," says Hennig.
"Before Luca, the police went everywhere and simply took the handwritten lists."
Luca would still regularly receive inquiries from investigative authorities.
"I myself have to deal with this topic at least once a week, but as Luca we don't release any data." He hopes, says Hennig, that the Mainz case will lead to such inquiries being less frequent.
Corona-Warn-App does not allow a view of the guest list
ZDF reported on other cases in which data from contact lists was misused: According to the Koblenz public prosecutor’s office, the police checked the paper list of an innkeeper in the summer of 2021 in order to track down a thief. The public prosecutor's office in Stuttgart informed the broadcaster that the police had evaluated the guest list of an event in July 2021 on suspicion of attempted homicide.
According to the report, a spokesman for the Federal Data Protection Commissioner criticized regulations according to which the federal corona warning app is not permitted as an alternative to the Luca app in most federal states: “With the check-in of the corona warning app, a solution is available , in which an unauthorized data query is not possible due to the decentralized approach.« There are currently no findings about unauthorized data queries from the bodies supervised by the Federal Data Protection Commissioner, such as the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Federal Police.
hpp/dpa
