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Support Impressum for public policy legal compliance
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Description

This impacts installs with public policy settings in countries that require Impressum. Germany, Austria, Switzerland and other countries are in the list.

Practically speaking though, this item is likely to not be completed in any foreseeable timeframe and users are advised to fork Phabricator as necessary to acheive Impressum functionality that meets their local legal needs.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum for general details. I found Facebook's implementation interesting; see https://www.facebook.com/help/342430852516247 and a news article about it at http://www.techinfoknow.com/2014/04/impressum-facebook-page.html

Original user request below, which was about making sure the footer is shown on every page. I think if / when we choose to support this we should do the full on Impressum thing, assuming the footer issue can still not be cleanly resolved.


This solution, i.e. no footer for the mobile version:
https://secure.phabricator.com/T7609#103244

Is a a major problem for me. Due to legal reasons ("compulsory imprint otherwise risk fine law"), I must make sure, that all pages show a footer.

So the feature request here is:
Please have a real fix for T7609 rather than removing the mobile page footer.

Event Timeline

patrick.schleizer raised the priority of this task from to Normal.
patrick.schleizer updated the task description. (Show Details)

It's not possible to show the footer on every page, we've never done this. It footer still appears on evey page it previously did before this bug.

chad claimed this task.

I'm going to close this since I presume it is just a misunderstanding. Specifically a footer does not exist on the follow web pages: Conpherence, Workboards. And on mobile we don't have a footer: Conpherence, Workboards, AppSwitcher. These are the only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head. Footers should display in all other cases (web and mobile).

Phabricator is not typically installed publicly (only a handful of installs have) so extending footer to cover "full-screen UI" cases is would be low priority. Mostly we'd need to better understand what exactly installs that need this legally actually need it for and why. If you have immediate need, we'd recommend forking or local patches until we'd be able to find an alternative.

Then perhaps it's a separate issue.

For me, unfortunately a law applies, that forces me to have the Imprint easily accessible from all pages with two clicks maximum. For now it seems like a link in the footer is sufficient that links to a page called Impressum that contains all the mandatory legal info. (That Impressum page can be a simple html page outside of phabricator, anything.)

More info on that law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressum

Our expectation is you will have to fork your install (or apply local patches) if you have needs beyond the upstream.

chad removed chad as the assignee of this task.Apr 7 2015, 5:51 PM
btrahan renamed this task from footer on mobile version to Support Impressum for public policy legal compliance.May 21 2015, 4:57 PM
btrahan lowered the priority of this task from Normal to Wishlist.
btrahan updated the task description. (Show Details)
This comment was removed by epriestley.

Pretty sure that was SEO spam, not just bumbling.

Actually, I'm pretty sure @denialgorge's comment is also SEO spam!

I guess "impressum" is the "mesothelioma" of 2016.

As is sometimes the case with legal issues, I think this request is based on a misunderstanding of the law. The German "Telemedia Act" establishing this requirement ("Telemediengesetz") does not seem to require the link to appear on every page.

This seems to be the actual legal text of the section which establishes the impressum requirement:

http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/tmg/__5.html

This answer on StackOverflow is somewhat helpful in navigating it:

https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/9796/kontakt-vs-impressum

The actual language is:

(German) Diensteanbieter haben für geschäftsmäßige, in der Regel gegen Entgelt angebotene Telemedien folgende Informationen leicht erkennbar, unmittelbar erreichbar und ständig verfügbar zu halten:
(Google Translate to English) Service providers must have the following information easily accessible, readily accessible and constantly available for commercial, usually paid telemedia:

...and:

(German) § 5 Absatz 1 TMG gibt vor, dass die Angaben leicht erkennbar, unmittelbar erreichbar und ständig verfügbar gehalten werden müssen.
(Google Translate) § 5 paragraph 1 TMG stipulates that the information must be easily recognizable, directly accessible and constantly available.

The StackOverflow answer cites another source to explain this requirement, although I'm not sure where this came from (it's not part of the legal text):

Unmittelbar erreichbar sind Angaben, die ohne wesentliche Zwischenschritte aufgerufen werden können. Nach der Rechtsprechung des BGH kann als gesichert gelten, dass das Erreichen einer Internetseite über zwei Links in der Regel kein langes Suchen erfordert und als unmittelbar gilt.
Immediately accessible are data which can be called without substantial intermediate steps. According to the jurisprudence of the BGH, it can be assured that reaching a website via two links usually does not require a long search and is considered immediate.

Broadly, the intent of this law appears to be protect consumers.

I think Phabricator can already be reasonably configured to satisfy these requirements:

  • Phabricator is generally not consumer-facing, so neither the German government nor any individual consumer is likely to have an interest in attempting to enforce impressum requirements against a Phabricator install.
  • Phabricator is generally not "commercial/paid telemedia".
  • An "Impressum" link in the footer or on the home page seems to satisfy the plain meaning of "easily/immediately/directly recognizable/accessible/available", particularly under the clarifying language ("without substantial intermediate steps", "via two links").

If you are specifically concerned that the mobile home screen does not have an "Impressum" link because it doesn't show the footer, you can add an explicit "Impressum" link in recent versions of Phabricator.