• ltxrtquq@lemmy.mlEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_stgb.html

    If this is an accurate translation of the laws, 203 is about doctors, lawyers, government officials, etc. sharing priveledged information they had access to because of their jobs and 206 only applies to owners/employees of telecommunications or delivery services.

    Edit: and to go one step further, Section 201: Violation of Privacy of Spoken Word means you can’t record phone calls without everyone’s permission, but Section 202: Violation of Privacy of Correspondence is about opening other people’s letters.

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
      1·
      1 day ago

      Uh, yes. I messed up the numbers. It’s §201 for audio recordings, §201a for private pictures, §202 for documents and letters with added paragraphs for “data” and electronic data and §206 specific for communication. Idk why I wrote §203, that’s for officials and doctors as you said. I meant §202. But yeah, the translation seems pretty accurate. Thanks for the link, I didn’t know we had that available. 😊
      I included §206 since that’s likely what an admin is concerned with. And we mixed that in earlier in the argument. But I believe that paragraph is just a specialized and more harsh version of §202, to increase the maximum penalty from 1 year to 5 years, if it’s your job to handle other people’s communication. Which might apply to Fediverse admins, but it’ll fall back to the other paragraph anyway.

      And by the way, there are some interesting quirks baked into those paragraphs. For example the one with pictures and videos is a lot more specific than the one with audio. So we get cases where it’s okay to record a video, but it has to be without sound.

      • ltxrtquq@lemmy.mlEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        Again, 202 is about opening other people’s mail/messages, with the electronic subsection being about accessing their digital messages when you aren’t supposed to. And section 206 wouldn’t apply to Drag at all, since they aren’t even an admin. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing legally wrong with sharing “private” messages that are sent to you.

        • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          Uh, I’m getting confused by this lengthy discussion with that many sideshows. Now I get it. You’re perfectly right with that. What happened in this case by the user is not really(*) covered by those paragraphs. This is about “Persönlichkeitsrecht” (personal/privacy rights), maybe including a sideshow with copyright. But this is way more nuanced and requires looking at the details. People have a right not to be doxxed or their secrets or private stuff being publicised. But as you said, there isn’t a general rule to prohibit sharing documents itself, without fail (like we have for audio recordings). With written text, a court needs to look at the actual content and see whether that’s protected or private in some way. Because privacy is protected in itself, and in that case it’s not about the form of a document.

          Edit: And to add to this: I think §201a still applies. Someones Inbox or DMs count as a private/protected space. Now if you take screenshots from that, that’s an “other images”. And the fifth subsection says these can’t be shared with a third party.