There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here give people a simple toggle that manages geoblocks on legal liability factors. It's way too much for every organisation to individually track every country's laws day by day in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability. And it sounds like the UK would have just self-selected out of the list of "safe" countries.
If something like this was in widespread use it would have much more impact since countries would see whole swathes of the internet immediately go dark when they make stupid laws.
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nadermx
The UK has been doing this sort of stuff for at least a decade. For example they have the PIPCU which under the guise of copyright threatens 10 years in prison for sites not even in their jurisdiction.
WhatsApp, Telegram and everyone else should pull out of EU in protest of Chat Control. Then EU will be forced to make its own chat app, UX will be terrible, and citizens will finally feel enough pain to contact their representatives ;)
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elAhmo
> The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.
This is quite a slippery slope. If I host a website in one country, I do not necessarily care where people access my website from. It is not like I actively provide a service to them - they just use internet (decentralised network) to access it. What if I publish a newspaper here, someone takes it where the contents are illegal, am I accountable?
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nickslaughter02
> Mr Capel said: “We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.
Block UK access now just in case.
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drnick1
At this rate, the UK won't have access to anything on the Internet soon without a VPN, until those are attacked too. Serves them right for being complete morons.
noir_lord
As a Brit.
Good - cause the maximum amount of pain, start pulling services across the board - the more it happens the more painful it becomes for the government to defend it.
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system2
I remember Imgur as a small project of a Redditor because we needed to share images. It is remarkable how a small project like that can still generate an international news headline more than a decade later.
chmod775
Imgur only has yearly revenues of around $30m. The money they make in the UK specifically likely doesn't justify wasting resources on compliance.
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roenxi
I suppose this is a serious question - does this mean that in theory HN should ban UK users? Or is HN likely compliant with this law? It is hard to pierce through the Orwellian language in the article (does "safeguarding children’s personal information" mean retaining or deleting the data?).
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gusfoo
FWIW, on old.reddit.com it still shows the cached image view, so no actual need to visit Imgur.com - a site that has had some quite interesting drama for the last few months.
thw_9a83c
Following this logic, I suppose that, in the future, cars that cannot automatically detect the presence of a child in a wheelchair and prevent the engine from starting will be banned.
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fifticon
imgur itself is an empty husk of its former self. Last time I visited their site, they had fired all their moderators and replaced them with AI. They were bought at some point by .. media labs? I don't recall their name, but I recall that they are moneygrubbing bastards, to phrase it in neutral terms. I don't intend to visit their site again. Instead, I have made an AI agent that can do it for me.
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dreamlayers
How is one country able to fine businesses in other countries? What legal authority or ability do they have to do anything?
What are they actually accused of? That article doesn't mention any specifics.
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sammy2255
How do you "pull out" of the UK if you are not a UK company, you are a US company, hosted in the US, and proxied by Fastly. There's nothing to do? You do not need to abide by UK laws, even if your website is accessible from there.
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Symbiote
The source is this statement from the ICO (Information Commissioner's Office, who enforce data privacy rules, GDPR etc).
Good for the UK IMHO. Just seeing with how many 3rd party sites Imgur shares data with is disgusting.
chuckadams
It's not a "UK Image site", it's a US company.
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trinsic2
Im sorry, if you run a site some where not in the UK. It doesn't give the country jurisdiction over the entire internet.
If a country wants to enforce some kind of rules, they will have to apply them to the countries residents, because its the resident that go out on the net and conduct the behavior, not the other way around.
This has been common sense for a long time now. Everybody is going crazy/mad. Must be some seriously narcissistic people running the UK.
Outrage! Now where am I going to get my cat pictures from ?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
physarum_salad
Hopefully many more companies do this and British internet users migrate to use of VPNs. This will apply maximum pressure on the government to reverse these parochial laws.
There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here give people a simple toggle that manages geoblocks on legal liability factors. It's way too much for every organisation to individually track every country's laws day by day in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability. And it sounds like the UK would have just self-selected out of the list of "safe" countries.
If something like this was in widespread use it would have much more impact since countries would see whole swathes of the internet immediately go dark when they make stupid laws.
The UK has been doing this sort of stuff for at least a decade. For example they have the PIPCU which under the guise of copyright threatens 10 years in prison for sites not even in their jurisdiction.
https://torrentfreak.com/uk-police-launch-campaign-to-shut-d...
And with that, they have at the least gotten registrars not located in their jurisdicrion to transfer domains
https://easydns.com/blog/2013/10/08/whatever-happened-to-due...
WhatsApp, Telegram and everyone else should pull out of EU in protest of Chat Control. Then EU will be forced to make its own chat app, UX will be terrible, and citizens will finally feel enough pain to contact their representatives ;)
> The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.
This is quite a slippery slope. If I host a website in one country, I do not necessarily care where people access my website from. It is not like I actively provide a service to them - they just use internet (decentralised network) to access it. What if I publish a newspaper here, someone takes it where the contents are illegal, am I accountable?
> Mr Capel said: “We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.
Block UK access now just in case.
At this rate, the UK won't have access to anything on the Internet soon without a VPN, until those are attacked too. Serves them right for being complete morons.
As a Brit.
Good - cause the maximum amount of pain, start pulling services across the board - the more it happens the more painful it becomes for the government to defend it.
I remember Imgur as a small project of a Redditor because we needed to share images. It is remarkable how a small project like that can still generate an international news headline more than a decade later.
Imgur only has yearly revenues of around $30m. The money they make in the UK specifically likely doesn't justify wasting resources on compliance.
I suppose this is a serious question - does this mean that in theory HN should ban UK users? Or is HN likely compliant with this law? It is hard to pierce through the Orwellian language in the article (does "safeguarding children’s personal information" mean retaining or deleting the data?).
FWIW, on old.reddit.com it still shows the cached image view, so no actual need to visit Imgur.com - a site that has had some quite interesting drama for the last few months.
Following this logic, I suppose that, in the future, cars that cannot automatically detect the presence of a child in a wheelchair and prevent the engine from starting will be banned.
imgur itself is an empty husk of its former self. Last time I visited their site, they had fired all their moderators and replaced them with AI. They were bought at some point by .. media labs? I don't recall their name, but I recall that they are moneygrubbing bastards, to phrase it in neutral terms. I don't intend to visit their site again. Instead, I have made an AI agent that can do it for me.
How is one country able to fine businesses in other countries? What legal authority or ability do they have to do anything?
The global internet sure was fun for a bit.
Prior discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45418587
What are they actually accused of? That article doesn't mention any specifics.
How do you "pull out" of the UK if you are not a UK company, you are a US company, hosted in the US, and proxied by Fastly. There's nothing to do? You do not need to abide by UK laws, even if your website is accessible from there.
The source is this statement from the ICO (Information Commissioner's Office, who enforce data privacy rules, GDPR etc).
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
Good for the UK IMHO. Just seeing with how many 3rd party sites Imgur shares data with is disgusting.
It's not a "UK Image site", it's a US company.
Im sorry, if you run a site some where not in the UK. It doesn't give the country jurisdiction over the entire internet.
If a country wants to enforce some kind of rules, they will have to apply them to the countries residents, because its the resident that go out on the net and conduct the behavior, not the other way around.
This has been common sense for a long time now. Everybody is going crazy/mad. Must be some seriously narcissistic people running the UK.
I do wonder if this is in any way linked to the ongoing enshittification of imgur, and the recent associated user revolt (link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45102905 ).
Outrage! Now where am I going to get my cat pictures from ?! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hopefully many more companies do this and British internet users migrate to use of VPNs. This will apply maximum pressure on the government to reverse these parochial laws.