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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

#391
post #299
post #267

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 wid…

I wish Wikipedia would take one for the team, and go dark in the UK. (And I'm in the UK). Wouldn't work with somewhere like China, but the UK might still be capable of being shamed.

At this point, the UK government is beyond shaming. On the contrary, it shame and record-breaking unpopularity seems to empower them.

I wouldn't put it passed them to require the digital ID to access the internet passed curfew.

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

#392
post #299
post #267

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 wid…

I wish Wikipedia would take one for the team, and go dark in the UK. (And I'm in the UK). Wouldn't work with somewhere like China, but the UK might still be capable of being shamed.

Never underestimate the power of spite

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

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on the kind of website. If you're not advertising, selling anything, or otherwise doing any business through your website you're much more emboldened to not care about every jurisdiction. 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 kn…

The huge plus of the internet is that you can be disruptive on a global scale on a somewhat even footing to the giants. If you place a giant burden such that before you even do anything of value you need to conform to 100s of different laws/regulations from 100 different countries you create a world where only large companies can exist and everyone else is pushed out.

Isn't that the goal of these nonsense laws?

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that there was no mention of Fahrenheit 451, the very reason they picked that number. They did at least put a thanks to Ray Bradbury.

Seems like they were trying to keep the reference low key, maybe to increase the odds of its acceptance

Same rule applies to any use of 42.

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

#395
post #267

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 wid…

> in case just by being accessible there you incur a liability. 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 de…

> 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.

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

#396
post #288
post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate this so bad. You know that the solution will be that EU will block US companies (who do not comply) so EU users will eventually get their own WhatsApp called MsgMeNow. The result is that nobody can talk to people outside their own jurisdiction. 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 h…

Yes, that's the only way for EU to have a tech industry. That's also how any non-US tech industry exists.

Enjoy using your http alternative not invented outside the USA then. And your x86 CPU since ARM isn't American.

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

#397
post #267

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 wid…

Does anyone know what their actual exposure currently is/was in the UK? They actually had offices and staff there?

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.”

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

#398
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how it's always "oh just safeguard people's data", oh "just" don't do anything bad with people's data. Then you look up what the actual regulation says and it's hundreds of pages of pure legaleese (over 100 pages for GDPR, over 300 for Online Safety Act), that you'd need to hire a team of lawyers to parse and interpret to make sure you're not breaking any of the regulations therein.

The US tax code is over 2.5k pages, with an additional 10k pages of regulations. And I manage to file my taxes fine every year without having read all that because most of it doesn't apply to me. Following the GDPR is easy if you aren't trying to maximize tracking with minimal concessions to the law.

Most of this comes down to "Use your brain" and if you try to get around it with an Um Actually, they have the specific page to counter it. You need a legal team when you want to ride as close as physically possible to violating the law without crossing the line.

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point the parent is making is that you don’t have to manually keep track of the countries you need to block. You just tell Cloudflare what your website does / what type of laws may be problematic, and Cloudflare manages the blocklist automatically. Makes a lot of sense actually that it’s surprising they don’t have this yet.

My guess is liability factor. If they get it wrong, massive liability on their side especially since someone could be like "I told you X" and Cloudflare didn't think the law applied or not. Better to put onus on the customer.

“”” Our analysis reports that the regulations that are currently being discussed and likely to have an impact on the following services of yours: {{SERVICES}}.

These regulations touch on the following points: {{POINTS}}.

Here are how each of your listed services would likely be impacted by the different components of the regulations:

- {{SERVICE}}

— {{POINTS}}

“””

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pull all investment out of the UK. Wow I didn't know big tech invested so much in the UK!

"Investment" here seems to be operations and personnel, resulting in taxes going to the UK government. They aren't making $630 billion per year in money off of those companies, but the operating income means they're getting taxes on that $630 billion (income tax from company and employees, VAT for purchases, etc.) and the personnel working in the UK are probably spending most of that money in the UK (velocity of mone…

The UK government is currently gas lighting the public into ignoring 60k+ in quarterly job losses and is historically unpopular. Despite that it is railroading orwellian attacks against rights and freedoms of the citizenry, all of which without a mandate. This is a kamikaze government of austerity-obsessed foreign agent traitors. The only thing they would be upset about in your scenario is about the inconvenience it would cause those trillion dollar American companies.
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