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Comment by cirno | Hacker News Reader

What about people who don't want stupid comments they made online when they were 14 permanently indexed and searchable for all of time by the Archive Team? Yes, they may have posted to Yahoo! Groups back in 1999 when they didn't know better, but now it's 2019 and you have people digging up decades-old dirt on people to try and destroy their reputations and careers.

Given that search engines have zero ethics when it comes to removing embarrassing (but not illegal) content, sometimes the loss of information is a small blessing for some.

Yes, it's their fault, but I also don't think it's fair that something a child said at 14 should haunt them their entire professional careers, either.

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The stuff stored in the Yahoo groups is material from the beginning of the internet. When people explored what could be possible and how easy is was to connect globally. You have a valid point, but it's also one of these things in our generation that we have to live with. We explored and tried things. Only now we look back and see what those explorations of our younger selfes really are; sometimes funny, sometimes embarrassing. However, if you are cautious, you may be able to delete your stuff or at least make it anonymous by deleting that said account. If not, you have live with it. Those of all these people can now learn from it and can educate their kids in being careful with the internet. (Or at least this is what it should be)

The dogma, that "everything posted to the internet will stay on the internet" , may not be entirely true for this first generation, because now large parts are already gone. But I am certain that this will be very true for the current generation, because I really doubt that Facebook and others will ever freely delete large datasets of user content.

Given that search engines have zero ethics when it comes to removing embarrassing (but not illegal) content,

Ethics are about codified sets of rules. Perhaps they're just following a set of rules that doesn't promote hiding things to make people feel better?

The archives are not easily indexable by search engines, they're posted as multi-GB gzip-compressed WARC files.

But someone could hypothetically convert the WARC files back to static HTML and host them on the clear web.

Hypothetically, yes; but right now all this stuff is available on the clearnet and searchable. So obviously any potential harm of the present situation, is decreased. And, unless your argument is that we should delete all fora on the web because someone may have said something embarrassing on them, then I think you'd probably want to come down on the side of preservation.

I'm pretty sure Yahoo isn't doing this to protect people from their old posts.

IA are extremely responsive in delisting content on request.

Email info@archive.org

Withhold wide-scale, anonymous access for a few decades maybe? (Though presumably there is a middle ground that doesn't involving leaving _everything_ inaccessible for a few decades.)

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