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Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
411–420 of 735 posts
Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
#412I don't think these laws are being made with the will of the people. 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 hav…
Over the years the amount of safety and speech issues that have cropped up have accumulated into a force. The OSA and DSA were announced years in advance, with multiple opportunities for feedback and analysis (I looked into the outcomes at various points but never contributed)
I would say there has been a groundswell of opinion, it’s not something that is covered here on HN much.
Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
#413I don't think these laws are being made with the will of the people. 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 hav…
And how has Australia ended up in a similar situation[1] - coming this December? 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...
At least recently[1] most Australians and an overwhelming percentage of under-16s supported the ban. Similarly in the UK[2]. This is a topic in which it appears it is the online discourse that's wildly out of alignment with broader public opinion and I'd argue potentially one of the reasons may be that it will make it harder for bot-nets to mass-manipulate public discourse so easily.
[1]https://au.yougov.com/politics/articles/51000-support-for-un...
[2]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/gen-z-social...
Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
#414I don't think these laws are being made with the will of the people. 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 hav…
And how has Australia ended up in a similar situation[1] - coming this December? 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...
Except that the policy, in the vacuum it is in right now, is very popular in Australia.
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.
Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
#415I 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
HN will restrict how fast you can comment without telling you (unless you figure it out and ask). There's no indicator that your account has this restriction besides being prevented from commenting, there's no indicator what the limit is, and the appeals process involves a subjective judgement by HN leadership
Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
#416There'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…
Quite the opposite! There's an opportunity for a service like CloudFlare here to give people a simple toggle that manages to circumvent such geoblocks. ;)
Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
#417Im 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…
If you are serving the UK market, you follow UK laws. It's that simple. In this case they are misusing UK children's information, that's a no-no in a country that has actual consumer protection laws. I'll wait for the EU to catch up on this too. 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.
"Serving a particular market" is ridiculous. Just adding Paypal to your website should not require you to understand 200 odd legal jurisdictions.
This needs to end asap.
Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
#418I don't think these laws are being made with the will of the people. 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 hav…
And how has Australia ended up in a similar situation[1] - coming this December? 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...
In a vacuum, the policy had really high opinion polling.
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...
Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But if you're trying to make money through your website... well sorry you're doing business in those countries. Say, I'm the provider... well sorry, you (the customer) are doing business with a foreign country (mine) and you should do it in accordance with YOUR laws about YOUR country's foreign trade. That's the only way to properly conform to jurisdiction, amirite? In other words, UK has no jurisdiction over US bu…
I love this idea of businesses doing and selling whatever the F they want and citizens being punished based on laws in their country. not sure why US businesses even have to obey US laws?!? just punish the consumers/citizens and be done with it of course defining what “US” business is might be quite challenging, is Apple a US company?! They make nothing in the US and pay no taxes in the US … love this idea though!
> not sure why US businesses even have to obey US laws
Because there are laws for US businesses over which the US government has jurisdiction.
> just punish the consumers/citizens and be done with it.
That happens too, when consumers break the laws that apply to them. In the case of international transactions, the law has to account for the pesky jurisdiction:
It's nothing new, when travelers/consumers go through the customs, THEY are responsible for the goods they import, NOT the party that sold those goods to them! That's the only sane way to do it and it's an established practice, there's no reason to do it differently when a consumer imports something using the internet!
> of course defining what “US” business is might be quite challenging, is Apple a US company?!
Yes it is, also, Apple's branches in other countries are companies under the jurisdiction of those other countries. It's not that complicated.
Re: Imgur pulls out of UK as data watchdog threatens fine
#420> 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…
I think it's a conflict that was baked into the Internet at its conception. A non-geographic service overlaid on top of a world with a huge amount of geography and borders.
The bordered nature of geography is just as much of a social construct as the borderless nature of the internet is. It's not a given that this war will be won by the former.