[acatton]

Granted, I'm not a native German speaker, but that's not my understanding of the "Impressumspflicht" law, if that's what you're referring to.

The law is mostly targeted at media and to some lesser extend businesses. The law is not enforced, and would be hard to enforce for individuals. For individuals, the law contradict multiple privacy laws, possibly the GDPR, and it might also conflict with some past rulings on the article 11th of the European Convention on Human rights. This article guarantees freedom of speech without persecutions, and one way to guarantee that is through anonymity.

My non-lawyer opinion is: people setting up an "Impressum" page on their personal websites in Germany are over-interpretating the law.

This is also the opinion of german lawyers[1]: "Impressumspflicht schön und gut - aber muss wirklich jeder Webseiten-Inhaber ein Impressum auf seiner Website führen? Ganz klar: Nein. Die Verpflichtung ein Impressum auf der eigenen Webseite einzubinden gilt nur bei geschäftsmäßigen Online-Diensten. Im Umkehrschluss brauchen Betreiber von Websites, die ausschließlich persönlichen oder familiären Zwecken dienen kein Impressum auf ihrer Homepage einzubinden."

Regardless of this, if you still want to put an "Impressum" page just to be safe, you can buy a "Postfach" from the deutsche post for ~€20/year and use that as your "Impressum" address, this way you don't have to doxx yourself.

[1] https://www.e-recht24.de/impressum/13095-impressum-fuer-die-...

[zwnow]

This is exactly what I was refering to though. "Geschäftsmäßige Online Dienste" can refer to anything. A shop where you sell stuff or a blog in which you ~could~ advertise a product, even though its a personal blog. People over here got sued over not having one in their YouTube channel. There are plenty of "Abmahnanwälte" (Lawyers) who'd happily sue you, if there is a slight chance that you could've earned a few pennies with your website. The actual laws do a very bad job at defining what exactly "Geschäftsmäßige Online Dienste" are.