Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
express.co.uk
express.co.uk
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.
Wouldn't work with somewhere like China, but the UK might still be capable of being shamed.
I wouldn't put it passed them to require the digital ID to access the internet passed curfew.
One person I believe knows this, is Keir Starmer. It's very hard to explain why things happen in UK politics without assuming he is trying to tank Labour.
To caveate this, I am a Labour member (with the goal of advising tech policy such that they don't send our tech industry off a sharp cliff). I've spoken to a few in the cabinet now about growth and industrial policy, and there's no appetite for engagement outside of their think-tanks. I go to the conferences today, and in contrast to the Tory government days where the main topic of conversation was "what do people want" and "how do we gain seats in the election", it's now all navel-gazing about how "well" their policies poll (vs how well the party does, as if they're the same thing). It's baffling how out of touch the current power brokers are regarding the danger Labour are in. There's rose-tinted glasses, and then there's obsidian-tinted horse blinders.
The part about only listening to their own think tanks is weird. Academia leans left. American conservatives are suspicious of advice not from their think-tanks, but that’s because it’s hostile territory. The Democrats treat the university/expert/consultant class as free labor.
I don’t mean to be critical of your country especially given who is running America. But we do watch, and it has an impact here. Fear of an American Corbyn is one reason Democrats aren’t veering left.
Also I don’t know if this is related, but the fact that the US is about to install Tony Blair to head Gaza should make you rethink Labour’s capacity for thought.
It's not an unreasonable assumption either. Nick Clegg did seemingly get rewarded for tanking the lib Dems. The ones lower in the party hierarchy will also have seen plenty of examples of pyrrhic loyalty being rewarded.
What modern parties effectively teach - UK Labour is just one of many examples, not even the only example in the UK - is that the supreme political virtue is loyalty to decisions taken in rooms you weren't invited to. That, they think, will eventually get them invited to those rooms.
The sad thing is that whether the rooms actually exist or not, the result is much the same.
"Don't obey in advance" is Tim Snyder's first rule against tyranny. While that is a great moral rule to follow in tyrannies, all organizations want people to obey beforehand, whether tyrannies or not. It's called showing initiative, doing what's needed without having to be told explicitly, and no organisation can function without it.
But in organizations with opaque power structures, where it's expected that decisions are taken unaccountably ("Noen har snakket sammen", loosely, "There has been discussion", used to be an ironic phrase in the Norwegian Labour Party), people may easily slip into obeying in advance a tyrant who doesn't even exist. They're trying to please the responsible people who are surely in charge somewhere nebulously above them in the hierarchy, but those people don't exist, it's bullshitters like Starmer all the way to the top.
Snyder's had his first rule, but I have a first rule too, which I keep repeating, and that is that powerful people believe in all the stupid things regular people believe in. They just act differently on the beliefs. A common person who thinks covid was an ethnically targeted bioweapon rants about it online and gets banned from Reddit. A powerful person who believes it, thinks "it's important that we too get such a weapon, and don't trust experts who say it can't be done, they probably just have scruples". A common person who thinks a Jewish cabal rules the world maybe pesters his relatives with it all day. A powerful person who believes it - well, he's more likely to do something like what Starmer has been doing the last decade. You don't try to fight Bilderberg, obviously, you try to get invited to it. Once you do, (like e.g Jens Stoltenberg was) you probably get disappointed and try to figure out who the real competent ones behind them too are, and how to join them - but you're not terribly disappointed, because on the way up you've been rewarded by all the others who thought they'd be rewarded for supporting someone like you.
Or they just focused on getting into government with very little plan about what to do when there, and with a particularly inexperienced team (few former cabinet ministers in the elected Labour MPs).
If they cared about the country - they don't, they have complete contempt for the public - they would step down, dissolve the party and those in the party with a remaining qubit of morality put their efforts into atoning for their sins and crimes against freedom by working to get a Green/YP/LibDem coalition elected.
Every day they lolligag with this dead party is another vote for Reform - they know this.
this isn't to say that Keir Starmer is doing an amazing job. he's not. he's far too comfortable with authoritarianism and far too establishmentarian, and I would much rather someone like Andy Burnham in charge--even if you can trust his policy positions just as much as Starmer's from when he won the leadership--just because he has some energy and charisma about him, and you feel like he might be able to counteract Farage somewhat, but, at the same time, the level of scrutiny of Labour is incredibly unfair and before you criticise them yourself, you have to try and remember that you're viewing it all through that filter
How is someone supposed to benefit from a thing whose only function is to reduce the friction against forcing them to correlate their otherwise-independent activity against their will?
For governmental services, I use it for things like logging into health care services. Where I've used it for checking my prescriptions, and communicating with my doctor. If I had kids I would have used it for contact with the school. An other governmental use is tax filling and tax returns which comes around every year, and this is just scratching the surface.
When it comes to non governmental usage, it is mostly bank and bank adjacent usage. I do use it to log into my different banks, my stock broker, and insurance providers.
The solution we have in Norway, is not perfect and one of the persistent problems, are that not everyone can get one, and since it is used a lot by the government, not having it, makes you a bit of a second class citizen. I do believe that they are finally doing something about that, and that the system will be redone a bit next year, so even if the banks don't like you. You will be able to get one.
The wallet uses Digital Verification Services (DVS) to poll APIs in front of the data the government already holds on you. These services check details you enter against that data and return cryptographic signatures for each. The wallet puts these together as IDs in a bespoke way, depending on what you need to prove. You can have any number of variations of ID and none of them are centralized.
Some of these signed proofs can be disclosed using Zero Knowledge Proofs (a cryptographic means of demonstrating something without demonstrating anything else) which would actually make it harder to 'correlate' you in the way you describe.
Another thing to bear in mind, the ID is backed up by the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 which reinforces data protection laws and actually wards against the use you describe.
There's a lot of misinformation flying around about this proposal, but the design itself doesn't match the negative characterizations. It's surprisingly good and weighted to the citizen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statisti...
Best I can find
$ 132,466.01 Africa
$ 4,902,373.13 Asia
$ 49,423,340.29 Europe
$106,546,895.77 N.America
$ 2,509,299.46 Other
$ 6,082,217.76 Oceania
$ 944,844.22 S.AmericaConvert that to GBP and you get about £7.5 million.
Figure that the UK accounts for about 15% of the European economy and assume it contributes to Wikipedia at about an equal share.
That's about £1.125 million in estimated annual recurring contributions from the UK.
You said 10-100/mo, so let's assume £55/mo or £660/year as the mean.
That would be about 1,700 Brits, a surprising number.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/data-protection-and-the...
>The ICO also confirmed that companies could not avoid accountability by withdrawing their services in the UK.
Wonder if it could also apply to American news sites (and Japan's 5ch/2channel, I was told they engage in this as well).
And as you can see they didn't even bother updating their block after Brexit.
This is a dangerous precedent though that IMO everyone should fight against.
It's how we get the balkanization of the internet, and the death of it as a global network.
TBH we also shouldn't put the onus on blocking "unsafe" countries on the website owners, nor an intermediary like CloudFlare. If a nation wants to block certain content, let the nation deal with it by getting their own ISPs to block and make sure the citizen's anger gets correctly placed on their government and not the site operators.
I don’t really understand comments like these. Even if you’re exactly right about how it should work, how would you make this happen in the world we live in? Neither the tech community nor ISPs nor cloud companies decide these things. Just because a matter affects us doesn’t mean we have much of a voice in it especially if it’s legal.
Laws about tech are decided by (idiot) politicians/parties/governments and the consequences are enforced by massive fines, imprisonment, etc. by law enforcement and selective (and often politically motivated) prosecution. In some of the worst places the consequences could include death.
Afghanistan just lost access to the internet almost entirely. China and North Korea are famous for their firewalls. Much of Asia has internet blackouts whenever there are large scale protests. The western world’s government has more legal jurisdiction/economic influence on the companies that run these things and are increasingly leveraging that for their desired censorship.
If the answer to this is democratic influence, the populations of many countries don’t really have that, the majorities in countries that do have it certainly doesn’t know or care about these things and wouldn’t vote for the pro-censorship politicians in the first place if they’d then vote to cut off their nation’s access to uncensored internet while preserving the uncensored variants, and even if the majority ever did care to get the system to work in this way there’s a global trend away from having their opinions on such things matter anyway.
But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries and I don't have a ton of objection to you needing to follow foreign laws.
I'm fine with "balkanization" (I know some people from the Balkan countries... maybe they'd object to the use of that word) if it means a freedom divide and actual consequences for countries ever eroding freedoms.
That ship sailed at least a decade ago.
From small instances like your employer blocking certain web sites (Google Translate, seriously?) to China's Great Firewall to nations restricting access in certain regions (India, many others), to nations restricting access to certain web sites (Turkey, many many others), to entire countries taking themselves entirely offline (Afghanistan, most recently).
(ip.src.country eq "GB")
Makes a lot of sense actually that it’s surprising they don’t have this yet.
Better to put onus on the customer.
Some parents are awful at parenting, so much so it makes me question why they had kids if they clearly don't care about bringing them up properly.
It's a no brainer that kids should have minimal screen exposure. There's even organisations which specifically state the most ideal screen time (basically none up to 18 months, 1 hour max up to 5 years old). iPad children will be a detriment to the future of any country.
The screen time is bad enough, without the sloppy content you can very easily find online. The best ways to destroy a kid are to saddle them with social media, media consumption and porn/gambling/vices at an early age. Their brain is being fried during development.
I’m consistently shocked at how authoritarian and draconian HN comments can be. Throwing parents in prison if their 12 year old uses the internet? Jail them and send their kids to foster care? This is your plan for improving the lives of children?
I totally agree but the UK government – particular Labour – doesn't want people to take responsibility really, because that would take from their own 'power'. There's nothing the UK loves more than a stupid population hooked on benefits and devoid of education, critical thinking and financial freedom.
My kids have learned a huge amount from the internet. I have guided them, discussed what are credible resources, the harms possible etc, who they talk to and what they tell them....
There are solutions that would make it easier for parents - people need tools to manage this. Require that children use child safe SIM cards in their phones (they are available already - EE advertisers them). Home internet connections should be by filtered by default that can then be turned off (or off for particular devices in the ISP supplied router that most people have).
It's an interesting idea. I presume that the there would be similar laws to selling guns. So there would need to be the national ID card and checks when selling any internet-enabled device. TVs, phones, cameras etc.
I as, a parent would probably need a phone safe, into which I could place my phone when I wasn't using it (though I suppose conceal-carry would be permissible). I;d probably want to have biometric locks on my TV, Chromecast etc etc and the children wouldn't be able to use the TV unsupervised unless all smart functions were locked down.
Doesn't sound particularly cool.
wait... wut? Gun ownership for 12yo's? wtf :D
Though the idea of "internet only for adults" is not that bad IMHO. Yes, internet is (well, at least was advertised as) infinite-resource-of-knowledge but we know how it turned out - IMHO minority of underage use it to spend hours reading wikipedia and instead spend hours glued to crap like tiktok (though crap like that should be banned altogether as well :D)
Smart thinking Batman.
They already can.
> Smart thinking Batman.
“Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.”
But the truth is, we are already there. CloudFlare can already do this, they just won't because the their customers will leave if they violate their trust.
Cloudflare just offers a button with fewer false positives than naive GeoIP databases. They're not so much gatekeepers as they are the security guards hired by the stores themselves.
i don't think "compliance" in a micropennies per click market like imgur is a full on "opportunity"
To your point about the proposed service, isn’t that what cloud providers basically already do in rudimentary ways or could do with finer grain regions?
Also, it seems the internet/WWW is basically being snuffed out right before our eyes as governments start using all manner of specious arguments to censor and control adults… for the children… of course. You as an adult are not allowed to have your rights because children may be harmed if you have your rights. “ No, no, we can’t keep the children from engaging in things that we deem harms them, your rights have to be relinquished instead.”
Not Claudflare though, let's not feed another monster monopoly :)
mullvad basically allows me to go around all the censorship in my country: https://mullvad.net/en
I don't even know what laws apply to the Middle East, Africa, or South America, but I'm sure there are enough of them to make most sites culpable in some way.
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...
Do people forget the owner of Megaupload being extradited? In many ways this is just catching up to the current US state.
And there's a lot of confusion here between basic consumer data protection laws and (IMHO massively overreaching) "Online Safety" laws. This isn't Imgur making a stand for free speech, this is Imgur wanting to track and sell user data - to which minors cannot consent. Putting on my tinfoil hat you could argue that many of these companies are trying to encourage this misunderstanding intentionally.
Committing crimes remotely from another country was never a loophole to escape the laws of that country.
When a country requests extradition they’re not claiming jurisdiction over another country. They’re saying that a crime was committed in their country by the person and they’re asking the foreign country for cooperation in prosecuting that person.
The MegaUpload case is not equivalent to what the UK is doing. MegaUpload was operating as a business, taking payments, and exchanging money. Once you start doing explicit paid business in a country you can’t claim you’re not involved with that country.
If a country starts claiming that merely making content accessible globally is a crime in their country, that’s an entirely different issue. Not equivalent to the MegaUpload case.
> Do people forget the owner of Megaupload being extradited? In many ways this is just catching up to the current US state.
Again, false equivalence. MegaUpload was operating as a business with US customers. They also had some hosting in the United States if I recall correctly.
Once you start doing business in a country and have customers there, you’re involved with their laws.
I’m not entirely sure the argument that the MegaUpload case and this Imgur case aren’t equivalent really holds up here. Imgur are collecting data from minors in the UK, and presumably selling that data (otherwise, why bother collecting it). Which is a crime in the UK (and the EU). You’re not allowed to collect people’s data and sell it without consent, and minors can’t provide consent (that’s basically what makes them minors).
Presumably Imgur sells adverts, and likely sells adverts to UK buyers. So for pretty much all the reasons you outline that the US should have jurisdiction over MegaUpload, the UK should have jurisdiction over Imgur.
I also take issue with the idea that being paid for something is the bar that we should be assessing a companies involvement in a country by. Obviously conducting monetary business transactions in a country is a very strong argument for jurisdiction. But it’s less obvious to me that breaking local laws, without making a profit, should somehow exempt a company from that countries laws. Particularly when the laws in question deal with how a company directly interacts with the citizens of that country.
Seems like a loophole for arbitrary criminal accusations of a people living abroad who are not affiliated with the country making the accusations. With this kind of logic, adult website operators should be extradited to some middle-eastern country for violating their sharia law online. It's wrong. Site operators living abroad should not be held accountable for not adhering to arbitrary local laws, unless they are conducting business directly in that country.
Megaupload's business model was pretty much exactly the same - but with "any" file instead of just images.
If the UK version didn't have ads, and UK-focused ads at that, they might have a point - but I don't see any "false equivalence" here.
And playing games about "indirectly" monetizing people (through ads or similar) doesn't mean they aren't /customers/. Otherwise every consumer law would be trivially worked around.
There’s been multiple cases where non-US gambling websites have had their domains confiscated by the American government because they have American users, going back about 20 years.
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?
> We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law
In that context it's completely fair to say "leaving doesn't absolve you of past transgressions".
Edit. If Imgur made any revenue from UK users then it becomes impossible to claim plausible deniability on any definition of "providing a service". If the UK can do something about this is a different matter. They could make CEOs/board personally or even criminally liable for the company's failure to pay a fine but probably won't.
I sell a advertising package from my US HQ based self serve advertising portal to a British company who use the service to advertise to customers in the UK. Ok - kinda UK revenue. How about 'To advertise to customers in the US' well it's getting highly debatable.
What about I sell advertising packages to a US company from my US HQ but someone in the UK views and advert on my site and therefore generates me 0.001¢ - debatable.
It's not about "hosting a website", it's about providing services.
If you provide services, like selling a newspaper, in the UK, you need to respect their laws, or you will suffer the legal implications of not doing so.
And regarding the accountability, it refers to the fact that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK:
> 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.
Companies providing services outside the UK can infringe all the UK laws they want, the UK doesn't care.
But as soon as you decide to provide services in the UK, you have to follow the law. And, as they explain in the article, if you break the law, stopping to provide services in the UK will not absolve you for your past wrongdoings.
Meaning that the servers were located in the UK, or that the users were, or both?
UK legal imperialism is self centered and unrealistic and undermines speech the world over.
There was a period a couple hundred years ago when it was all the rage internationally to write constitutions. Lots of countries got constitutions within a few decades, and almost no constitutions have been written since then. I wonder sometimes how the internet would be different if it were implemented in an era or culture in which people believed in that sort of thing.
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."
When read in context, it's obvious the statement quoted in the HN conmment refers to only to accountability for "prior infringement", i.e., acts committed before withdrawing services in the UK
The most obvious example of this is websites from the UK or Europe which operate any kind of gambling. [1] This may well be legal (based on licensing) in their jurisdiction, but they still need to restrict access to prevent US people from accessing the service or they will be breaching the US's gambling laws.
Likewise many US firm geofence access for EU residents out of fear of GDPR.
People hosting news sites have often had to geofence to prevent UK residents from accessing their site if they are hosting any kind of reporting of UK court cases that are under embargo or matters that are subject to one of the UK's famous "Super injunctions" [2]
[1] eg this guy was on the board of a listed UK company operating as far as they were concerned entirely legally who was arrested in NYC https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/sep/14/gambling.mo...
[2] eg In the "Ryan Giggs" super injunction case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_British_privacy_injunctio...
…and if the site has no UK assets, how enforceable is the injunction?
Why not just avoid travel to the US?
And it also extends to countries with extradition treaties to the US; holiday in the the Dominican Republic? You can be arrested and extradited to the US (Gary Kaplan). And of course if you change planes in the US (David Carruthers)? Arrested. Only broke the laws of one US state, and you change planes in another? Arrested (Peter Dicks).
Although perhaps the real lesson there is to be better at avoiding the US.
If you are wanted in the Western world and the US wants you, you are likely to be got.
IMO the question is not if such services should be held accountable by local laws but how they should be held accountable. I think it would make more sense to go after the UK entities profiting from the endeavor: advertizers and financial institutions involved.
They're leaving and they're getting the fine. Implying if they didn't leave and implemented changes, that there is a chance they may not have been fined.
If they breached laws and regulations then withdrawing their service from the country afterwards does not change anything regarding those breaches (investigation still ongoing, though).
It's not comparable because the "crime" has been committed in the hosting country (where it's arguably not even a crime) and it's a bad example because there are many incidents of murderers fleeing to non-extradition countries.
If you travel to their jurisdiction, yes.
USA (Kim dotcom)
Russia (Skripals)
China (Teng Bio)
Israel (Mordechai Vanunu)
Block UK access now just in case.
It'd be interesting to see how fast the policy would get reversed then.
This was always a stupid policy and so protesting it by pulling services is one way to draw attention to that.
The fault is obviously an incompetent and authoritarian UK government, but that's what the UK overlords have agreed.
The opinion polls are clear: the normies want this.
If I have a website I'm pretty sure I'm bound to break some random country's law without knowing
Answering my own question, I guess it's exceptionalism of the powerful countries where they can just bully you into following their law
(no, its not the cookie law either.)
That's the funny or hypocritical thing: Both laws have the same reach but people here tend to praise the GDPR for it while being furious about the Online Safety Act.
There's been no groundswell of opinion, no technically minded authority pushing expert opinion.
The same people lobbying for the online safety act were pushing age verification tools. The government is exceptionally unpopular, even by the standards of already deeply unpopular governments in recent years.
I despair of the situation in the UK. How have we ended up here?
The British people always take any new limitations with the classic stiff upper lip. We could very easily become Russia (without the military and natural resources), because the population has the same say nothing, do nothing mentality.
There's also always been a bit of authoritarianism in the British populace. Just look at how enthusiastic people are about banning things that annoy them. During coronavirus lockdowns, the people living around me constantly reported me to the police for going out for runs (which we were perfectly allowed to do).
We have a national crab in bucket mentality, which doesn't help any country. Intelligence, fitness and success are all things that British people love pulling down. Many people here care more about ripping everybody down than building them up. They live completely mediocre lives and are perfectly fine with the government nannying them.
The two main parties policies have converged, so have the older smaller parties.
The only choices we have that are any different are Reform and The Green Party, and possibly Corbyn's new party that seems busy imploding right now. Of those, Reform has some nasty people in it, and is rapidly attracting the worst of the Conservative party (look at the defecting MPs), The Greens and Your Party have some fairly nuts people and ideas too (in different ways).
I think ordinary British people are pretty decent.
> We could very easily become Russia (without the military and natural resources)
We have a much bigger economy than Russia.
> any people here care more about ripping everybody down than building them up. They live completely mediocre lives and are perfectly fine with the government nannying them.
I agree with the last bit.
People are also negative about their follow citizens. A lot of people believe the country is full of untrustowrthy "gammon". and back the government/establishment against the latter.
My guess is that the common factor is News Corporation pushing an agenda on behalf of the very, very wealthy.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/comments/1nu68je...
[1]https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un...
[2]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gen-z-social...
In reality, the technical implementation will undoubtedly be a privacy and surveillance disaster.
In a vacuum, people thought "social media" meant "Instagram and TicToc and Facebook etc."
In reality, the eSafety commissioner thinks "social media" includes platforms like GitHub. Yes, really.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-24/digital-dilemna-socia...
It was one of the most agreed with policies at the most recent Federal election.
I hate it as a concept, but at the moment it is all "don't you want children to be protected?", and nothing of substance that people can meaningfully find objectionable (like imgur getting cut off).
I don't think it is particularly a policy of News Corp, although they're happy to run with populist ideas, and more just an issue the Labor party thought they could wedge the Liberals with.
The UK doesn't have governments, it has a public policy unit for global capital, with the Americans calling the shots on foreign policy, and a knee-jerk taste for authoritarianism at home.
I would say there has been a groundswell of opinion, it’s not something that is covered here on HN much.
The only connection I see is "I don't like UK Internet policy"
Not only they don't represent anything but there own little interests, but they won't even have the decency to express clearly what they are standing for. Even lip service is not assured anymore.
I think of calling my representative as being like proof of work. It takes a modicum of effort to look up their phone number, compose some spiel, and make the call, compared to delivering spam by the truckload.
Why? EU can just tell an LLM to build an alternative app, they can just tell it to make it user friendly and make no mistakes. That's the primary use case of Trillions of dollars of investment in GPUs and electricity to power them.
JK(or am I?), a protest will be a boon for EU, which is growing Anti-American each and every day. The EU alternatives don't exist not because Europeans can't code but because EU market is open to US companies and there's no reason for duplicate effort as winner takes it all thanks to network effects. EU capital just invests in USA based companies that operate in EU. It's much easier, lower taxes lower worker protection standards etc. Also, US has much more capital to burn to corner the markets, they also just go ahead and buy anything European i.e. Skype. and not risk competition.
This is effectively what we see in China. They only use WeChat, I was unable to register because it says I need someone to verify my account when I try to do it (this has been happening since 2018)
This means officials only care about what their party leaders tell them to do, not what voters think because voters matter very little to them. That's why American "contact your representatives" does very little here - they are not your representatives, they are representatives of party leaders.
same as that weird official USgov version hosted by israel
> Sending to your local police dept... OK
> Sending to intended recipient... Failed
> Please open the door
We'll make our own Chat App! With blackjack! And...
If the EU or companies within did make a chat app and it got widespread appeal, it would just be exactly the same as WhatsApp. WhatsApp isn't special in any way whatsoever, besides having a critical mass of users.
When did the US government make a chat app? Signal?
In other words: What pain?
Nor even was it when Skype and IRC were made (by Europeans). SMS (also European) was slightly harder to invent because that's not on the internet.
It doesn't work like that because the European "Parliament" is a joke. For starters, they can't initiate anything, they can only approve or reject (of course that it's almost always approve) stuff that is being passed to them from higher up, most of the times from the European Commission, if I'm not mistaken. Ah, they can pass/generate "resolutions", which are basically empty words put on a piece of paper.
Second, the people there don't "represent" anyone, at most they represent the political parties that have put them on the lists that got them into the European Parliament, but that's it.
I think that's largely down to people not taking EU elections as seriously as national elections.
The ones elected by my country are always largely the most doldrum people from the main parties that aren't charismatic enough to win in national elections (The b-squad basically)
... and a handful of the kind of people that think windfarms generate wind and that we need to leave NATO.. even though we haven't joined NATO. The kind of people you vote to send to the EU so that you don't have to see them.
There was an election in 2024 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_European_Parliament_elect...
For people unfamiliar with it https://elections.europa.eu/en/
The parliament is elected by people in each country, those elected them elect the commission. So a form of indirect elections.
…
> service
Money is good for goods and services…
If people give them money or cough ad revenue and get the service they want, that’s called a business.
That's decades of the public internet that would be permanently erased; billions of dead links pointing nowhere. HN alone would lose ~32,000 images from its archives,
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Is it not hubris to call it "no loss" if, say, 3 hours ago, "Design of a LISP-based microprocessor / Page 22 has a map of the processor layout:" was forever lost to humanity, as collateral damage to some techbros' dispute?
Decentralization can't arrive soon enough.
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.
This is about a GDPR violation. I'm not sure that cheering for our right to have our privacy respected by companies revoked is really what we want.
Imgur's business model is ad sales and tracking users - that inherently requires collecting and protecting data, including vulnerable groups like children. Even if the UK rules are imperfect or possibly overbroad (I haven't read them), if a company choose to operate where a law applies, it's on the company to follow it or to challenge it through the courts, not to blame the regulator after the fact.
> requires collecting and protecting data
Thanks to OSA, service providers have to collect even more data from users, including face scans and IDs. They usually outsource that process to third party companies, which obviously are registered in Cyprus or another shady country. We can expect a massive leak in a near future, and no one will be prosecuted, though you will receive a letter from the government saying: "We are really sorry for the leak of your data, we weren't able to get in touch with the data processing company, so we kindly ask you to revoke your passport and apply for a new one. Stay vigilant as someone might use your identity for illegal purposes".
> including vulnerable groups like children
The "vulnerable group" is proficient at using VPNs. Ironically, the new law affects older generations the most.
Because the law is dumb and it is our moral imperative to not just ignore but break dumb laws
Because if we've learnt anything from the debate around the Online Safety Act, it's that the majority of people are so unbelievably addicted to porn they feel like it's a human rights violation to put up barriers to their access to it. While there are obvious privacy arguments against sharing your ID to access these sites the alternative is just not viewing porn. It's remarkable how unfathomable that idea is to entire generations of people.
Why is it always that regulation is the problem, not the company being irresponsible with data.
Yet learning how to cross the street is an essential skill in life. They are also filled with flowers, pathways to playgrounds and much more. And that's why children are not forbidden on the streets.
My point being: let's educate instead of regulate. "Regulating the children" is silly and countereffective.
Is it the knife that kills or person doing the stabbing? Or the knife maker? Can the knife be taken to court?
Is it $website allowing the children on it or the parents allowing them? Can the parents be taken to court?
The "children's safety" argument is for voters who are technologically illiterate and don't have a tiniest idea how the internet works.
Can you be irresponsible with childrens' data if you don't know whether your users are children?
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
It's good companies are walking out of jurisdictions where FUD is the basis of a law.
https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/the-children-s-code-what-i...
The difficulty is getting enforcement; in practice, what happens is that the fine is put down as outstanding and if any executive or employee of the company enters the country, they're arrested and held hostage until the company pays up (or are held directly responsible for whatever the company is accused of). Most countries usually have corporate presency laws to avoid this sort of scenario though.
Alternatively, the judgement can be enforced through diplomatic channels, but that's a giant clusterfuck and unlikely to succeed unless it's something that's very blatantly a crime in both countries, since it's effectively retrying the case. (And even then it can depend on if the country just doesn't feel like cooperating for that specific case, for no other reason than spite; France for example is fond of doing this.)
Most commonly it's the EU fining American tech for GDPR violations and related privacy shenanigans.
"No, you can't ask questions. We gave you clarity, don't you understand? Take it and go away."
You said this like it is a bad thing, which is baffling? Obviously cars should do this. One of the best things about adding self-driving features is we can add features like this (and speed governors) to make cars a lot safer for everyone.
And yes, perhaps the rules should be followed regardless of what they are, but perhaps the government bureaucracy is such that it's just too hard to change rules.
I'm one to think that the UK is generally overregulated, excessively obsessed with safety, and the regulation ethos is inconsistently applied. The government and civil service are also incompetent to the extreme. There also isn't a culture of accountability in government.
I also think that regulation is often simply used as a revenue generation measure, which is not what it is supposed to be about.
Perhaps a good middle ground is for a company that is at threat of investigation is simply asked to leave the UK or pay a fine.
As someone who moved to the UK from the states recently, this has not been my experience at all. Any paperwork i've had to do with the government (immigration, NHS, drivers license, car tax) has been incredibly smooth. On top of that, the city council in the area I live seems great -- they put on a ton of events, and have lots of services that seem to get used well.
Most of the incompetence i've seen is from private companies (e.g. banks and real estate).
Screaming "bureaucracy" and "overregulation" for every single attempt at limiting the impact of corporations is just silly.
Just tell your citizens that the internet is fair game? Why restrict it to this level and make using the internet the same as having to understand the law in 200 odd countries.
Have them all registered to the Principality of Sealand, just to be safe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealand
>You do not need to abide by UK laws, even if your website is accessible from there.
The UK government does not agree.
Requiring this is not a bad thing
Governments/Regulation is the only tool at our disposal
How else should we approach this problem? Do we just throw our hands in the air? Or do we think that serving pornography and suicide promotion is not something that requires oversight?
The core of this issue is a kind of backwards notion that the internet needs to be a safe place, that the UK government says it can legislate that everyone on the internet has to verify who is accessing their site and then enforcing the UK's laws around it. It's nuts.
It's also not solving a problem. If you want to control what your kid sees on the internet there are already safeguards you can use, you can set up content restrictions on basically any device today. This law appears to be in place to be the mummy of children whose own mummies don't want to enforce certain restrictions on internet access.
I hear next month the M25 is going to be prosecuted for letting a child walk down the hard shoulder.
They're already using Google Docs as a chat application in class when social media is blocked. So what are we really trying to do here? Much like prohibition, I suspect we'll see the masses annoyed and inconvenienced, and those who want to find alcohol finding it regardless.
Sometimes I miss the old flash, irc, html tables for layouts internet.
So what's left?
The only actual internet caused disaster I can think of - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide - was caused by a lack of regulation and "let's kill them all" stuff on facebook. 25k+ dead.
It's essentially because of shitty parents allowing kids unsupervised access to the internet, rather than expecting parents to parent they pushed the cost/risk to companies.
Imgur decided they didn't want to foot the cost/risk and pulled out.
As a brit, I don't blame them, if I was US based I'd geoblock the UK as well.
Not least because it's the only way this will make enough of a stink for the gov to climb down.
Is that info from Imgur? Or from conjecture?
>90% of parents allow their kids unsupervised access to the internet. That's reality. We've spent the last 30 years begging them to supervise and it hasn't worked, so proposing to do it again is a nonstarter.
On the other hand, I completely get why. Expecting parents to know how to operate Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, iOS, Android, Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, ChatGPT, and school-issued devices is absurd, delusional, obviously never happening. CompTIA A+ Certification, for entry-level help desk work, requires learning about less platforms than what a parent faces. Even then, what about the computers that have minimal filtering at school libraries, or at friend's houses?
Denial of the kids on the internet as a problem, combined with unfair expectations on parents, is how we got here.
In Poland we had no access to "western" electronics since 1989 because we had been part of the "Warsaw Pact" i.e. subordinate to USSR. This was hard, so I pity for you guys in UK
I think you meant "until 1989"
There is an ongoing ICO investigation about privacy and handling of children's data under data protection laws, rather than this being related to the Online Safety Act:
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
The ICO has indicated it is planning to give a fine to the owner of Imgur due to breaches of data protection laws.
Whatever the annual revenue of imgur was is now up for grabs for any British entrepreneur willing to build an image hosting site and unless British people have an innate preference for exporting their data to the US they'll likely stick with that. In other words, it's a good opportunity for the domestic tech sector, that's what happens in most cases when foreign companies tend to be blocked.
Politicians always lie/"break promises", so whatever they say before an election only has a loose correlation with what they actually do. Pay attention to their track record and vote accordingly next time.
That's about the best we can all do.
Like many others, I would like to see a Swiss style vote on anything that gathers enough public support.
Apparently, there are a few sources that suggest a 'silent' majority supports the OSA. I think far reaching laws like these (the assisted death law changes being another) should always be put before the public. That way at least, I can better understand my position, and consider whether I'm in the wrong.
(I feel the OSA should have forced the ISPs to add parental controls, and let each household manage their own patterns of consumption)
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/media-centre/news-and-blogs...
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
No full detail though. Having said that, the second link is particularly interesting as it goes though various companies with comments about each.
Get the fuck out of here.
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.
Simply by sending some threating letters to payment processor management. It was done by few hundred fanatics who want to censor what content everyone is allowed to access.
Since this is possible, there not enough resistance and UK government have much more resources we'll all have to live with this.
While the UK and EU (and US) like to pass stupid laws, in this case it's just an American company misusing citizen's data and not giving a crap. Good riddance.