Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine

express.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 735 posts

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

#211

Post by joe463369 »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #48
constantcrying wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK government does not care. The law applies no matter where you are hosted, where you are incorporated or who is proxiying you. >You do not need to abide by UK laws, even if your website is accessible from there. The UK government does not agree.

I suppose in their defense, culturally, the UK hasn't respected many borders apart from their own so this really isn't anything new. Zing aside, I'd be thrilled to see whatever prosecutor or litigator or whatever they call them over there bring a case against a US based company for hosting content in the US, geoblocking the UK, a UK resident using a VPN to bypass that block, and making the case that that is somehow t…

> I suppose in their defense, culturally, the UK hasn't respected many borders apart from their own so this really isn't anything new.

Did the US respect the borders of Hawaii?

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

#212

Post by psychoslave »

andai wrote: post #177

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 ;)

I did contacted them. All of them who didn't yet have a referenced public position on fight chat control for France. By phone. Only two responded with a clear alignment. Good that I did it by phone, because apparently for some of them getting several thousand emails per day can only mean they are victim of a spam attack.

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.

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

#213

Post by varispeed »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #185
perihelions wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "It will be of no loss if it were to fail entirely." 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 processo…

> 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? https://web.archive.org/web/20230427181813/https://i.imgur.c... (link is already dead at Imgur) Wayback will have them, as is tradition. A crawl (non IA) has been kicked off to reconcile to ensur…

archive.org is also blocked in the UK. I cannot access it without VPN.

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

#214

Post by matt-p »

nadermx wrote: post #144

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…

So has alot of Europe to be fair, I think it's a cultural thing honestly.

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

#215

Post by downrightmike »

andai wrote: post #177

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 ;)

> Sending message...

> Sending to your local police dept... OK

> Sending to intended recipient... Failed

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

#216

Post by weberer »

fulafel wrote: post #75
dreamlayers wrote: post #11

How is one country able to fine businesses in other countries? What legal authority or ability do they have to do anything?

Being a country means you can make your own laws so the authority question has a pretty clear answer. Unless you disaviow national borders and state power and such stuff generally of course. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty

Read the question you're replying to again. Its a question about jurisdiction.

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

#217

Post by ben_w »

andai wrote: post #177

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 ;)

Chat apps were already so oversupplied as to be free even before AI could vibe code them. Or, indeed, before the US relented on export bans for remotely adequate HTTPS implementations.

In other words: What pain?

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

#218

Post by matt-p »

buran77 wrote: post #57
elAhmo wrote: post #37

> 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…

The following paragraph might shed some light on what that means (emphasis mine): > 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 de…

Definition of 'Revenue in the UK' is a bit debatable though isn't it?

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.

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

#219

Post by cwillu »

abtinf wrote: post #194
IlikeKitties wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who write this stuff still don't understand that big tech IS THE ENEMY. They are quite happy to implement this, even up into the OS Level. It's called Regulatory capture. Now your legal Moat to a true European Alternative has become even bigger.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we grant the premise “big tech IS THE ENEMY”, it does not necessarily follow that the vast mass surveillance national security apparatus is our friend.

It's the same coin.

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

#220

Post by josephg »

iamnothere wrote: post #108
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…

> I don't think it should be terribly surprising that states don't subscribe to this view of sovereignty and jurisdiction. Well they will have to put up with it, as they have done over the past few decades. Or, alternatively, they can engage in aggressive China-style site blocking. Only the US has significant extraterritorial legal reach. IMHO, this policy is a transparent effort to forcefully alter the content polic…

> IMHO, this policy is a transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of US companies.

I don’t see it that way. US companies have an atrocious record wrt user privacy and security. The Europeans don’t want their citizens data being bought and sold by online providers. And that’s a reasonable demand! Either clean up your act or leave Europe & the UK. If US companies don’t want to obey UK laws, they can’t do business in the UK. It’s just like farmers can’t sell produce in the UK if they don’t meet British health standards.

Consider the inverse: imagine if another country ran a porn site which blatantly hosted underage content (CSAM). Under your view of the world, would the us govt be ethically entitled to tell the site to clean up its act or it’ll get blocked from the US? That sounds fine to me. I’d be shocked if they were even given a warning about that. But how do you square that circle? Wouldn’t that be a “transparent effort to forcefully alter the content policy of another country”?

Post reply on HN