German police use coronavirus contact-tracing app to find witnesses

I'm arguing against the misguided notion that this is being dismissed as conspiracy theory, which it absolutely is not. Luca has been controversial since the beginning.

The reason why a centralised solution was chosen is quite simple to see, though:

In the centralised system, the health agency knows who to contact when they might have been infected and could in theory force these people to do a test or into quarantine (in practice, they usually don't have enough personnel to do so, though...).

With the decentralised system, every person can get a notification when they could have been exposed. Whether or not they act upon that notification is up to them.

In the end, I don't think the privacy nightmare is worth it (especially given that health departments are understaffed), but I can see how other actors could come to a different conclusion without it having to be a conscious decision to collect a ton of data for other purposes.

How it goes as usually.

Just wanted to also leave this here: https://www.ccc.de/en/updates/2021/luca-app-ccc-fordert-bund...

"The Chaos Computer Club (CCC) demands an immediate end to states' alimentation of Smudo's million-dollar tax grab "Luca app."

and also as always, predicted the illegal data grab, but noone ever listens..

(… I wish I was joking. I'm not.)

[ed.] just to be clear: that absolutely does not excuse the states' decisions. While it might be understandable that someone can drive social and media discourse with some luck and prior experience, it's the states' job to do their due diligence and not base their decisions on empty PR.

Many organizations are just using blockchains for a standardized namespace for pseudonyms and standardized toolkit for non-chain encryption.

So the users in this case would just sign a message for uniqueness, instead of relying on other forms of entropy like their phone or something. They wouldnt be writing anything to a blockchain for tracking and the addresses wouldnt be used by anything else or have funds in them.

There’s no reason the Luca app also couldn't do it this way. But I’m not sure if it would have mattered, or why the health department had identifying data after decrypting anything.

Likewise, I haven't read the Terms of Use for installing the app. It very well might have a clause for this use case.

[CITATION NEEDED] That's the what the job offers talked about and doesn't justify the focus on smart phones. Unless you've read the job offer or, like me, personally know people on the inside, you're just making stuff up.

> You can dislike and oppose the current measures (I'm not a fan either FWIW) but that does not mean that everything they are doing to modernize their terrible IT infra is part of a bigger plan.

A personal identity application, on a cell phone, is already being abused by the government.

Things like Lab Leak, masking, hell at one time people claiming that the covid vaccine would need boosters were labeled "conspiracist" spreading mis information

Pretty much anyone that says anything 1day to 6 weeks before that thing is uttered by Dr Fauci is labeled as "conspiracist" until such time as Dr Fauci has blessed the position as "Science" because he after all he "is the Science"

OP is just strawmanning.

(Moreover, the phrase "could be seen as fuel for conspiracy theorists" doesn't mean that something bad isn't happening, it's usually used as a way of saying "don't do this stupid thing because it encourages people to think we do even stupider things").