The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has imposed a £247,590 penalty on MediaLab.AI, Inc, concluding that the company allowed children to access Imgur for years without putting in place even basic age-checking safeguards required under UK data protection law. Following a long-running investigation, the regulator found that MediaLab failed to establish the age of Imgur users, processed the personal data of children under 13 without parental consent, and did not carry out a data protection impact assessment to identify or mitigate risks to younger users.
Britain's data protection regulator issued 17 preliminary enforcement notices and sent warning letters to hundreds of website operators throughout 2025, a pressure campaign that brought 979 of the UK's top 1,000 websites into compliance with cookie consent rules and gave an estimated 40 million people-roughly 80% of UK internet users over age 14-greater control over how they are tracked for personalized advertising.