Header image

It's full of stars

Where documentation meets reality


The privacy protected privacy statement

By Tobias Hofmann November 10, 2023 Posted in SAP
Tags: legal

Reading time: 2 min read


Accessing the SAP development tools site đź”— gives you access to a wide range of useful and maintained tools for developers.

Private privacy

In the header toolbar are some legal links, like legal disclosure or privacy.

Clicking the privacy link leads to an access protected page. Without providing credentials, you don’t get access to the privacy document.

Not exactly what I expected. I would suspect that the privacy statement is publicly available. As the tools site is.

Root cause

What happened? The underlying technology used for the tools site is UI5. Looking at the source code reveals what link is called by the privacy button.

The target link is: https://help.sap.com/viewer/Development_Tools_Privacy đź”—

Opening the link in the browser leads to a redirect to an access protected site.

One call goes to http.svc/login

This call is triggered by a redirect by JavaScript.

For some reason, the logic wants to access an access protected URL.

Result

Hard to believe that the privacy link should redirect to an access protected site. If this is the expected behavior, the link should be marked as access protected. My impression is that the link should go to a public accessible privacy statement. And that this link should be fixed asap.


Update

The privacy statement can be accessed without authentication. I had to find this out by myself, because, guess what: no one from SAP bothered to inform me that they fixed it.