Comment by wiether
7 months ago
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 allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.
Companies providing services outside the UK can infringe all the UK laws they want, the UK doesn't care.
But as soon as you decide to provide services in the UK, you have to follow the law. And, as they explain in the article, if you break the law, stopping to provide services in the UK will not absolve you for your past wrongdoings.
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".
> Imgur's entire purpose is clearly to host user generated content
Not at all. Imgur does the passive side too. And by number of operations, it is by far the biggest one.
2 replies →
> that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK
Meaning that the servers were located in the UK, or that the users were, or both?
It's so ambiguous. Let's say I'm a citizen of country A, currently residing in country B. I'm using a VPN headquartered in country C to make my traffic appear to originate from country D. I access a web site with servers physically located in country E, that uses a load balancer / cache hosted in country F. The company that runs the web site is headquartered in country G but has employees in countries H, I, and J.
Whose laws need to be followed?
> Whose laws need to be followed?
The ones where you reasonably believe your customers are based, and where your employees are based.
Lets be honest, 1% of your customer base using a VPN is not going to cause you issues, unless those people are uploading something that would cause the state to act (ie CSAM, fraud, drugs, terrorism, you know the big four.) Given that this is the ICO, and nor OFCOM, we know its to do with GDPR violations, not moderation.
its not like the ICO just sent an email saying "lol you're being fined, bye". They will have had a series of communications, warnings asking for reasonable changes, time lines for change.
The ICO has discovered that Imgur are breaking GDPR in a fairly big way and in a way that can be easily detected by an understaffed and over worked semi-independent organisation.
moreover breaking GDPR in a way that is obvious enough in a court of law[1], bearing in mind that the UK, just about has a working independent and largely neutral judiciary that isn't easily intimated into doing the governments whipping.
[1] the ICO doesn't tend to be showy.
Seems like B and G. Then if you do business with A (what the GPDR calls "UK Establishment") and A has laws governing its citizens abroad like the UK GPDR then also A.
2 replies →
What service is Imgur providing in the UK specifically?
Memes.
OFCOM: You are are hiding illegal Pepe menes underneath your floorboards aren't you?
- UK 2025
2 replies →
Advertisement.
It’s you who are mixing things. Putting up a website outside the UK and “deciding to provide services in the UK” are two decidedly different things.
UK legal imperialism is self centered and unrealistic and undermines speech the world over.
The US does exactly the same thing, including at the state level. See e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg
And you’re suggesting that if the US does it it is ipso facto a good idea? Strange reasoning.
This is also apples and oranges. Running credit cards involves knowing exactly where people are located. You do in a real sense “decide” to do business with people in a given country.
Not every website does that. Some just serve posts to all comers. Some allow people to upload an image. Deducing where those people are from is non trivial. When I blog something I’m not “deciding” in any meaningful sense to “serve” people in country X.
I’m guessing that Imgur happily accepted the ad revenue from UK users while it served them images. If you genuinely were “not providing services” to UK users, you wouldn’t do that.
I’m not happy with extraterritorial assertions over internet services either, but you can’t wish them away with sophistry about “we’re not providing services to them!” if you’re happy to take their money and serve them a page in exchange. That’s the definition of a business providing a service to a customer.
Do they run their own ad network, or do the ad networks take the money from advertisers and cut Imgur a check? Maybe instead of trying to enforce your standards on every little site on the internet, you should just focus on the people who actually have a direct point of contact with money coming from UK businesses. (Yes, the ad networks.)
It’s completely absurd to say that some hobbyist would have nexus in the UK because they run a Google Adwords campaign to get some occasional pocket change from their project. Pre-Internet, it would be like going after a US magazine because someone brought home a copy from the US. Websites are not global entities by default, somehow responsible for obeying laws across nearly 200 national jurisdictions and many more state/provincial/local jurisdictions, across different languages and legal customs. Completely absurd! Who do you think you are to demand such a thing?
On the other hand, I think it would be perfectly fine to say that UK domiciled ad networks cannot put their ads on sites that violate some arbitrary standard. (An anti-freedom law to be sure, but at least it’s consistent with common international conventions.) This puts the onus on the ad network, rather than the site owner, who may not know or care who is visiting or from which country.
11 replies →
> if you’re happy to take their money and serve them a page in exchange.
How about the fact Imgur just ceased service to millions of users from which they took no money?
> if you’re happy to take their money
The law doesn’t require that they take any money, and you’re merely guessing they are. Weak