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Anyone who wants to shop at the furniture wholesaler Ikea in Berlin must first install the Luca app for contact tracking.

Luca is now an integral part of the opening strategy at various branches of the Baby One wholesale store, at the retailers in the “model city” of Rostock and at various events in Berlin. Nothing works without the app.

If you don't have a smartphone, you should get a key ring to log in, retailers and organizers can connect to the Luca system via PC and camera.

In short: Luca is currently swimming - despite all the criticism of the past few weeks - on a wave of success.

The makers of the start-up behind Luca, Nexenio, are currently sitting out the criticism from security experts and data protection activists.

Data protectionists see "considerable risks"

Because it is still not possible to determine whether the Luca app meets the requirements for data protection and data security.

The Luca makers have not yet made the program code of their servers open, although they should actually do so according to the specifications of the licenses of the open source code they use.

Although the conference of data protection officers from the federal and state governments had requested it.

Although the Berlin data protection officer Maja Smoltczyk had previously warned of “considerable risks” with the app.

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Compared to WELT, Nexenio CEO Patrick Hennig announced the publication shortly after Easter or for last Friday.

But so far the code cannot be found online.

This means that no independent security check is possible.

When asked, a Nexenio spokesman said: "The code will of course also be published, which will also be published very soon by the middle of this week according to the current plan." Changes had to be made beforehand.

However, researchers at the University of Lausanne criticize the security concept as potentially full of holes.

So far, Luca has primarily been the victory of a marketing strategy that, in retrospect, can almost be seen as half-silly.

It starts with how Luca got into the app stores in the first place.

Because Google and Apple actually have strict guidelines for apps that are used to track contacts in the pandemic and collect contact information from users for this purpose.

Google's “Requirements for apps in connection with the coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease” stipulates, among other things, that the app store only includes apps that have been created or commissioned by health authorities.

The BSI's Corona Warning app complies with this requirement.

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But when Luca came to Apple's App Store on September 18, she was registered as a “utility” and on Google, for the first time on December 10, as a “tool”.

The creators carefully avoid the “health” category.

The words "Corona" or "Covid-19" are also not in the app - nowhere is it indicated what the purpose of the contact tracing should actually be.

Luca was able to get started with an app, while competitors rely on cumbersome web interfaces instead.

Furthermore, Luca initially marketed itself everywhere as "free", shop owners and organizers as well as private users were allowed to install the program without payment, there are no fees for commercial users such as with various competitors.

Successful PR show

This is exactly what the German rapper Smudo alias Michael Schmidt, rapper in the German hip-hop band Die Fantastischen Vier, advertised in various media appearances, initially on the radio and on the Internet.

He asked for a call back from Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn in a newspaper interview and finally had the breakthrough at the beginning of March with a highly regarded appearance at Anne Will.

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The downloads shot through the roof immediately - and Schmidt was suddenly passed from hand to hand in politics and was allowed to present his app to party leaders and health ministers.

60 health authorities were already using the app in March, when Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania was the first federal state to sign up and make Rostock a model city for the Luca mission.

Only then was there talk of money for the first time: the state paid 440,000 euros for its license.

But the potential of the concept must have been known to the shareholders of Fantastic Capital Beteiligungsgesellschaft UG, which was founded in November.

Because they hold almost a quarter of the shares in the Luca app mother Culture4Life GmbH.

The commercial register does not list exactly who the shareholders are.

So how big Smudo's participation in the Luca app is is not known.

On Twitter, critics talk of a lock strategy: First, Luca connected individual municipalities free of charge, then they took over the persuasion work for the license purchase at the state level.

This is now proving to be astonishingly lucrative for an app that is essentially based on free open source code and on technology developed by Bundesdruckerei - developed by a start-up that gets by with a good 50 employees and that was previously only relatively inconspicuous digital workplace optimization.

Bavaria is now paying 5.5 million euros for an annual license for the Luca app, Hessen a good two million, Saxony-Anhalt around one million.

This was the result of a survey by the Netzpolitik portal among the federal states.

According to the research, the “free” Luca app has already brought the creators in more than 20 million euros - almost without participating in formal Europe-wide tenders, without complying with complicated guidelines for software for the public sector.

This means that the Luca makers can save.

For example, according to the barrier-free information technology regulation of 2019, apps for the public sector must be designed to be barrier-free.

However, the Luca app has not yet met this, as the German investor Ralf Rottmann criticizes.

A spokesperson for WELT commented: "We have started developing the accessibility of the app and have linked it to the relevant associations and partners."

Luca and Smudo are currently reacting aggressively to criticism.

For example, Smudo warned in the "Handelsblatt" against ruining a functioning system and complained that the critics were aiming "below the belt".

Compared to WELT, Hennig criticized the reporting on potential problems with the app, saying that he was "surprised" by the critical tone of headlines.

But the first doubts seem to be spreading among its customers: Thuringia, for example, is now relying on an open interface with the health authorities in order to give Luca's competitors a chance.

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