German police under fire for misuse of Covid contact tracing app

They cant help themselves. Many countries have abused their tracing app for general telemetry and law enforcement. They always start by saying "We wont abuse your location data for non health related inquiries! Trust us!", and follow up saying "We are sorry we were caught abusing your trust".

You would have to be a damn fool to install them. These apps are universally dystopian. (I carry my paper vax card, which is not recorded by venues).

"Luca App: CCC calls for an immediate moratorium 2021-04-13 21:04:42, linus"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26832525

In General this will have less of an effect than you’d think, because effectively you are unable to enter restaurants or bars in most cities without having the app because the owners refuse to offer manual paper based contact tracing due to increased effort even though it is totally legal to not use an app at all.

> Culture4life added that it receives frequent requests for its data from the law enforcement — but those requests are routinely denied.

This seems to point to a structural problem: why isn't there any backpressure to law enforcement that teaches them to stop filing these requests in the first place? It's OK to depend on the app's makers to be on guard once or twice to remind them about what the data can be used for, but at some point law enforcement should also internalise what they should and should not have access to.

A catastrophically stupid decision besides its basic immorality. Germany has a large and well-organized anti-vax movement with some troubling connections to the far right. Having legitimate privacy anxieties validated just gives that movement a shot in the arm, as it were.

What a careless decision, naturally the German twitter is now full of requests to uninstall Luca.

Police abusing their power and attributions? What is the news? By now most of the people should be thinking about this things happening before supporting policies that can, and will, be abused and misused.