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Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

express.co.uk

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Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#171

Post by pjc50 »

eduction wrote: post #59
wiether wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears that you are mixing things here. 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 all…

It’s you who are mixing things. Putting up a website outside the UK and “deciding to provide services in the UK” are two decidedly different things. UK legal imperialism is self centered and unrealistic and undermines speech the world over.

The US does exactly the same thing, including at the state level. See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#172

Post by toomuchtodo »

chmod775 wrote: post #7

Imgur only has yearly revenues of around $30m. The money they make in the UK specifically likely doesn't justify wasting resources on compliance.

It is an image storage service masquerading as a business. It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#173

Post by hashim »

pixl97 wrote: post #65
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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] …and if the site has no UK assets, how enforceable is the injunction?

I mean, in the case of the US, you board a plane in country X going to country Z, it flies over country Y which is friends with the US. The US has country Y land the plane and has the plane boarded by armed men that drag you off kicking and screaming where you are put in a cage and then shipped to the US.

Or worse, shipped to Guantanamo Bay/Bagram Prison, where the US can do whatever they want even to US citizens because they're no longer in US jurisdiction.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#174

Post by SXX »

trinsic2 wrote: post #158

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 s…

Just a few months ago games built by US-based developers, sold on US-based platform with payments processors also US-based were censored by actions of Australian christian activist group.

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.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#175

Post by betaby »

layer8 wrote: post #149
patrickmay wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the owner of a U.S. based website, I am not sending data anywhere. Some people in the U.K. might request data and download it from my site. I'm not forcing it on them.

HTTP responses (website contents) are data that the web servers you are paying for are sending. People can’t download anything from your site without your servers sending the data. Nothing forces you to send that data when you receive an HTTP request. Indeed, geoblocking is a common way to prevent sending data to jurisdictions whose laws the sending of the data might be in violation of.

HTTP GET is pull, not push. The user is pulling data, not the server is pushing data. Government doesn't care though. It intentionally have chosen not to understand that detail.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#176

Post by foldr »

lurk2 wrote: post #165
Analemma_ wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The standard you are proposing here ultimately boils down to "you can do business in a country without being subject to its laws, as long as your commercial transactions with the customers in that country are laundered through a sufficiently convoluted network of international companies like payment processors and ad exchanges". I don't think it should be terribly surprising that states don't subscribe to this view o…

The standard you’re proposing would allow Afghanistan to shut down Hacker News on the basis that it provided services to at least one Afghan and the content here violates sharia law.

Afghanistan can do that. You’re protected by Afghanistan’s lack of any realistic ability to enforce laws far outside its borders, not by some general principle of international law saying that countries can’t make laws about websites.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#178

Post by deadbabe »

crimsoneer wrote: post #168
roenxi wrote: post #9

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?).

HN has moderation, won't track you without telling you, and will delete your content if you ask. That's literally all it takes, it's really not that Orwellian

Will HN really delete all your content if you ask?

Like, all your posts just disappear?

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#179

Post by qwoppos »

Barrin92 wrote: post #137
physarum_salad wrote: post #51

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.

>This will apply maximum pressure on the government to reverse these parochial 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 happen…

The value of imgur isn’t really in being able to upload images there, it’s access to all the images uploaded from the rest of the world. Especially historical uploads, say, a turorial or a travel log using imgur as reliable image host. Locally created and operated british website aimed at brits makes sense when it’s local news or local services or whatever. Local image hosting site that serves only (primarily?) brits seems of very questionable utility unless you somehow become a big hub for outsiders… at least until $other_country demands UK stop tracking their children or whatever excuse they’ll use.

Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

#180

Post by deadbabe »

oldjim798 wrote: post #167
etchalon wrote: post #139

The global internet sure was fun for a bit.

Was it? It did a tremendous amount of harm as well. Future historians may judge us very harshly for how cavalier and flippant we were in unleashing this technology onto the public.

The internet has been around for decades. We are the future historians.
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