Overview
- Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig presented the draft Friday, calling digital violence a mass problem that hits millions and disproportionately affects women.
- The bill adds three crimes to the penal code: invasion of intimate privacy through images, deceptive content that harms a person such as non‑sexual deepfakes, and unauthorized surveillance using tools like GPS trackers.
- Making and sharing sexualized deepfakes and other non‑consensual intimate images would be illegal with penalties of up to two years in prison.
- Victims could ask courts to unmask account holders, require platforms to preserve data early to keep evidence from disappearing, and order temporary account suspensions to stop ongoing abuse.
- The draft enters consultation before cabinet review and a longer Bundestag and Bundesrat process, and it rejects a real‑name rule while backing time‑limited IP address retention that privacy advocates and judges warn could be hard to implement.