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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

#81

Post by pixl97 »

thw_9a83c wrote: post #63
constantcrying wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you being sarcastic about this. Obviously that will be a legal requirement at some point, just like constantly supervising the driver for tiredness is.

I'm not being sarcastic. I'm predicting a trajectory of never-ending increase of regulatory requirements for any human activity which I don't like. Only big players have deep pocket for lobbyists and lawyers to avoid them or resources to implement them.

Complexity increases in every system till it fails. Avoiding this entropy may be impossible.

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

#82

Post by afandian »

notarget137 wrote: post #62
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…

Does every single website that exists and is available in UK automatically provides services in UK? Isn't it just simpler to completely block every request from UK by default to "not provide services"?

Transactional services (I don't know if that's the right word), where you have a known user, is different from passively providing web pages that people can read and you don't track them or ask them to register for an account.

But I think that distinction was pretty moot when web 2.0 came along.

Imgur's entire purpose is clearly to host user generated content though, so you can't argue it's not "providing services".

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

#83

Post by pixl97 »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #54
CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to have UK legal presence, and planning to move out. The UK is saying something like "crimes done during your presence won't be ignored". If Imgur never had UK presence, then yeah there would be no teeth. But if you're doing business in a country you can't break the law then leave and expect them to just ignore what you did during that time.

…but how enforceable would the fine be? They pull out and have no UK assets to seize.

Depends.

If you're the US you call planes of out the sky that have representatives and owners of the companies on them.

I'm assuming any leadership of Imgur would want to avoid going to the UK for the rest of eternity.

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

#84

Post by hollerith »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #73
BeFlatXIII wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

…but how enforceable would the fine be? They pull out and have no UK assets to seize.

> They pull out and have no UK assets to seize. How do you expect the "pull out" to happen? They must have had a UK bank account or similar, whose transfers won't get approved as they're trying to escape from criminal prosecution. Or they'll work with the US to ensure responsible individuals are held responsible. It isn't exactly the first time someone/something commits crime in a country then try to escape, there is…

>they'll work with the US to ensure responsible individuals are held responsible.

I heard here recently during a similar discussion (about 4chan and this same British watchdog agency) that the US does not allow extradition of its citizens for breaking non-US laws if the behavior is legal in the US.

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

#85

Post by iamnothere »

weinzierl wrote: post #58
thewebguyd wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But its still not the UK government's decision. They don't have sovereignty over other nations, as much as they'd like to think they do. All they can legally do is bitch and moan and order UK ISPs to block. There's no action they can legally take against Imgur.

The US does exert its laws extraterritorially when there is a sufficient nexus to US interests too. Why wouldn't the UK be allowed to do so?

The UK? How many divisions do they have?

Why shouldn’t Russia be allowed to exert their laws extraterritorially? Or Mali? Or Sudan? Or the Iranians? Or China? Or Israel?

What you’re asking for is the end of the internet, full stop.

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

#86

Post by keanb »

HardwareLust wrote: post #64

Question: How does a company block access from an entire country? Is that done through DNS or IP range or something else?

When you receive a request to your website (or any service), that request comes from an IP address. There are databases that can tell you what country an IP address is from. It's not perfect, but it works well enough 99.99% of the time. Then, if the country is blacklisted, you do not allow access.

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

#87

Post by daveoc64 »

It's actually unclear what the cause of this is.

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.

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

#88

Post by stavros »

SAI_Peregrinus wrote: post #72
stavros wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but the UK is saying they'll fine Imgur even after Imgur blocked access. At that point, what tooth does the fine have? "You must pay this fine if you want to, err, nothing I guess"?

They're only threatening to fine them for previous violations of the law, not anything after they block access. Blocking access doesn't make the existing fine from when they were doing business in the UK go away, it just prevents future fines. Whether they can collect the money while Imgur aren't doing business in the UK is a different argument, but it's not particularly controversial that a country can fine a busine…

Sure, I'm only saying that I don't think there's much they can do by way of enforcement if the company decides to stop doing business there, especially over fines this small (it's not like the UK will push to extradite over this).

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

#89

Post by thegrim33 »

jsheard wrote: post #15
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?).

It looks like this law (which is unrelated to the Online Safety Act) is concerned with children being subjected to ad-tech tracking and similar indiscriminate data harvesting, so a site like this which doesn't feel the need to share your habits with 2,541 partners is probably out of scope. https://ico.org.uk/for-the-public/the-children-s-code-what-i...

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.

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

#90

Post by HardwareLust »

keanb wrote: post #86
HardwareLust wrote: post #64

Question: How does a company block access from an entire country? Is that done through DNS or IP range or something else?

When you receive a request to your website (or any service), that request comes from an IP address. There are databases that can tell you what country an IP address is from. It's not perfect, but it works well enough 99.99% of the time. Then, if the country is blacklisted, you do not allow access.

So that could be defeated by a VPN?
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