This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
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 ?
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...
The 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so companies that didn't do anything to become compliant in advance were playing chicken in the hope that it'd be repealed before they ever had to obey it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How 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.
If you already have already committed a violation then yeah.
This 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.
Age verification is a notoriously difficult problem
It's not a problem at all, though. Parents should be verifying what programs their kids use.
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:
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.
How long until parliament decides to push the undo button on this stupid law?
When 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.
Who even uploads porn to imgur? There's far better hosts for that...
It won't even work as child protection, because horny teenagers gonna find a proxy or a vpn, or gonna find dodgy porn sites that don't check your age
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)
The only way this law stands is if they're being paid more to keep it than... oh shit.
