Olio CafeImgur blocks access to UK users after proposed regulatory fine
www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gzxv5gy3qo
Share on Mastodon
Share on Reddit
Share on WhatsApp15 Comments
Comments from other communities
FlaxI was wondering why so many stuff posted on Lemmy were just pictures saying “this is unavailable in your region”
Having broken assets reminds me of using the Web in China, when a lot of sites using Google Fonts had broken fonts. Lol.
stravanasuWhat I wonder: are the majority of UK citizens OK with this law?
Not that it matters probably, as UK isn’t a democracy in practice…
FlamekebabHard to say, but I doubt it. Our governments don’t ask before doing stuff - they’ve seen how stupid we are when asked basic questions.
…it will be interesting to read the judgements when when they refuse to pay the fine. And I’d be willing to bet a fiver that a judge says that global blocking is not sufficient to remove a website from responsibility.
Lime Buzz (fae/she)Wow :
“We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.”
It’s insane. They could be fined even after entirely leaving the country ?
oce 🐆If it’s like GDPR, it applies to the citizens currently residing in the country, the location of the company or servers do not matter. Now if Imgur doesn’t have anyone there, no business happening and the website is already blocked, I don’t think they have much leverage.
What I’m understanding is imgur could get fine even if they dont offer their service anymore in the UK.
They could go back to just after the law passed and tell them “hey you were infringing on this extremely disrupting law that would completely change your business in the UK so pay up”.
I mean if a business just decides to not serve UK customer they should leave them alone… Especially such a complex law for something like Imgur…
AnyOldName3The law was announced a long time before it came into effect, so companies that didn’t do anything to become compliant in advance were playing chicken in the hope that it’d be repealed before they ever had to obey it.
It’s not actually a bad strategy, ultimately the law is probably going to get slapped down as unworkable and there’s pretty good evidence to suggest that they knew it wouldn’t work even before they implemented it, which won’t make them look good.
Unfortunately the courts move so slowly that none of this has happened yet and the law has now gone into effect because the timer ran out, but in theory they could have done all the work to comply only for the law never to have happened.
The law was announced a long time before it came into effect,
Isn’t one of the basic principles of law that laws can not be made retroactive so as to arbitrarily extract punishment? if someone tells me “we’ll implement this law in 2026” and they do commit, then I’m unconcerned until 2025-12-31.
But if you break the law after on 2026 you don’t get any excuse for not having time to adapt to the new circumstances.
Eh, if it’s an unfair law it has to be fought. And since we have seen in Trump’s world the courts are not the place for that, I can think of very few places to do it. Most of them can equip guillotines, tho.
Why sure but, how could they force Imgur to pay up?
Practically they can’t. In theory they could complain to the United States that a US business is attempting to circumvent UK law, but I can’t imagine that having much effect at the moment.
In theory it all works because companies would be more inclined to pay the fine than to lose UK customers, in reality of course it doesn’t work because everybody would just use a VPN anyway, but the people who wrote these laws don’t know about VPNs because they think computers run on magic smoke.
Well technically, yeah
Practically: good luck getting that money.
On the other side, does the UK now require age of for every website out there, including the millions of semi amateur porn sites?
Because; good luck with that too, that ain’t never going to happen
This law was thought up by idiots they actually got consultants in who all told them that this wouldn’t work but they decided to ignore the consultants because they wanted to implement the law anyway.
So yeah genuine idiots.
They got lots of consultants in from MindGeek who own Pornhub etc. and several age-verification services. They told the government that the consultants who were raising issues were overreacting, and the government believed them because obviously the world’s largest porn company wouldn’t encourage them to enact a law that would do bad things to the porn industry. They didn’t stop to think that the law as written means there’s now a requirement for smaller compliant porn sites to either spend more than their total revenue implementing an age-verification system or buy in one of the ones MindGeek own.
teftHow would they enforce that fine even if they decided to give one? Unless imgur banks in the UK i think they’d just tell the UK to pound sand.
Ignore for a second the law in question. Suppose Temu started importing harmful goods into your country in the knowledge that they were going to poison kids. (This doesn’t seem too much of a stretch…) Should it be OK for Temu to just say, “OK, we’ll just stop importing to the UK then”? Shouldn’t they face the consequences for breaking the law?
I think this take is motivated by disagreement with the law in question (although it’s not actually clear exactly what they’re alleged to have done - the ICO released a statement saying it relates to an investigation from March, so before the age verification requirement).
Technically Temu doesn’t import anything. They’re allowed to sell toxic or otherwise dangerous goods because the customer’s the one importing them, and there are plenty of things you’re allowed to import for personal use that you wouldn’t be allowed to import for retail. The EU’s working on closing this loophole, but the UK isn’t in the EU anymore.
BrewchinThis kind of malicious compliance is exactly what this dogshit Think Of The Children Act needs. Convenience is everything to the majority of population.
If other major sites and resources do this, then the pressure from the people impacted by it will force UK PLC to un-fuck this awful legislation.
The title is a little bit misleading, it’s mostly about Imgur not adding the age checking that the UK’s infamously disliked new law requires on possibly mature content.
Age verification is a notoriously difficult problem to solve in a privacy-respecting way, and Imgur is literally about unobtrusive image embeds so I doubt they could even make this work.
The title is completely in line with the known facts. This is the ICO statement which does not mention anything about age checking.
There has been widespread speculation that this is related to age-verification but so far I’ve seen no evidence of this, and the fact that the investigation started in March makes it seem unlikely.
Thanks for sharing. I should push back on your statement a little.
The investigation relates to how MediaLab’s Imgur social media platform uses children’s information and its approach to age assurance.
And in the Children’s code strategy progress update mentioned.
One platform has committed to introduce age assurance methods, to help ensure that children have an age-appropriate online experience.
To comply with child data protection rules, you necessarily have to either:
- Know that they are a child by checking their age
- Not collect information on anyone
It does look like the focus is mostly on data collection, not content moderation, so I will concede on that point. I should have read a bit more into this before commenting.
That’s true, but the age assurance they’re talking about here seems much lighter than the age verification mandated by the OSA. This page has information from the ICO on this - searching through for “age assurance” it seems clear to me that the ICO is talking about either taking an age field on account creation, or on using some other algorithmic means to estimate users’ ages.
Age verification is a notoriously difficult problem
It’s not a problem at all, though. Parents should be verifying what programs their kids use.
earthwormHow long until parliament decides to push the undo button on this stupid law?
abbiistabbiiWhen it hurts them or their paymasters economically.
Can’t happen soon enough. However this is actually about control so any collateral damage is irrelevant
Well it is about control they have to at least maintain the illusion that it’s about child protection. They have to at least maintain the veneer of legitimacy. So if enough people make enough noise about how this is actually a privacy violating nightmare (even though that’s actually the point) they will have to pretend to be concerned about that.
Anyway they have an out, this is mostly a Tory policy anyway that just got implemented under labour, so if it becomes a noose around there necks they can just get rid of the unpopular Tory policy and now they’re the heroes.
I can’t see them actually undoing it. It will just become a thing that is no longer enforced. Once one company stands up to it and refuses to pay the fine, and the uk can’t force them to pay, others will do it. Once enough do it the UK will stop trying (hopefully)
TrackinDaKrakenThe only way this law stands is if they’re being paid more to keep it than… oh shit.
pumafred09Yeah, I just uninstalled the app. I barely went on it anyway, as I’d be a bit apprehensive about what thirsty content was currently trending.
So you’ve uninstalled the app because you are concerned about the content they may be hosting, yet you had the app installed on your phone already. Eh? How does that work.
Anyway everyone knows that DeviantArt is where you go for that kind of thing anyway.
Yeah I had it installed because it was linked to an old Reddit account. Reddit used to use Imgur as the hosting site, so it had a fair few pictures I had uploaded for posts. When they separated, I kept the Imgur account. But I barely used it…
That’s going to probably either encourage a lot of people in the UK to get VPN service or leave a whole lot of users staring at broken image icons.
imgur blocks VPNs. Ask me how I know.
How do you know?
https://gist.github.com/michelleeywao/b10f25152200040f291fd6c6d0d71329
This appears to be from three months ago. It sounds like Imgur can ban IPs — I assume that this is a tempban.
The above study lists success rates for requesting images on various VPNs. NordVPN is at 98%, ExpressVPN 97%.
It also says that free VPNs have a far lower success rate, as their IPs tend to be blacklisted.
The entire Internet should block off the UK. Would be amusing to see how fast they backpedal
Forgot to mention usa
The Americans might not even notice
Thats true, most social media is teeming with americans, every other nationality is a minority on them.
Sounds like a great idea, then.
Does Imgur even have infrastructure in the UK? How could they even levy a fine? If I’m running a business in the US or Canada or EU and the UK tries to tell me to to pay a fine, how can that possibly be enforced? I’m running a service entirely outside their jurisdiction. It’s not my responsibility to enforce the laws of foreign nations.
You can choose not to pay the fine, or block them. If you do neither the UK will eventually block you. It works on the same basis that GDPR does, you are serving and handling data on UK citizens, they have rights that the UK gov is protecting (but in this case it’s apparently the right to not accidentally see a boob or view personal health content).
So it sounds like they can’t really enforce the fine, but they can restrict me from the region for noncompliance. Blocking me seems well within their rights, I suppose. This whole hypothetical was based on the idea I don’t depend on their market at all, so it’s not like it’d harm me.
It is very much your responsibility to abide by the laws of that region!
What are you talking about?
You may not choose to do so but that does not mean you don’t have to abide by the laws of the country. Worst case you get arrested if you ever go into that country.
Best/worst example: Copyright
Edit: If you do business in that country
But does it really constitute doing business in that country when you do everything your home country? Your servers, your workers, your ISP, your bank accounts, your currency coming in and out of those accounts, the companies buying your ad space, all completely out of their jurisdiction, but since someone within that jurisdiction reached out and made requests to my web server, I’m obligated to abide by their laws? It doesn’t seem tenable. It effectively means that any commercial website must comply with all laws anywhere in the world or geoblock outside their intended range.
Yes. And it sucks if your native language is English, as that will go across multiple regions. If your website was only available in Swedish, then you could easily argue that your website was not meant for people in England.
But as long as you do business - and you very much do so when you have users there that looks at ads that generate money to you - then that country can say that you have to follow the laws there.
Another good example is GDPR. When GDPR became active, you could run into many websites that blocked EU countries as they were not yet GDPR compliant and/or didn’t want to be. And cookie banners - another EU thing that has spread across the world and maybe been adopted by other countries.