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.
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.
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.
Yeah, 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…
