This is something that keeps me worried at night. Unlike other historical artefacts like pottery, vellum writing, or stone tablets, information on the Internet can just blink into nonexistence when the server hosting it goes offline. This makes it difficult for future anthropologists who want to study our history and document the different Internet epochs. For my part, I always try to send any news article I see to an archival site (like archive.ph) to help collectively preserve our present so it can still be seen by others in the future.
It’s a double-edged sword, in my opinion.
I’ve had a terrible experience trying to get Archive to delete my data from almost 20 years ago because I have no current proof that I owned it. I was young and it was the first few years of modern internet (2000-2005) and I made a bunch of websites, exposed a lot of information about myself, and now it’s sitting there.
It’s “mundane LGBT+ teenager stuff”, and I do not want it there. And no one (no anthropologist from the year 3000 or an alien race in 448576 years) will benefit from having it either. But it could affect me today in my hometown if someone decided to dig it up.
On the other hand, I fully agree that there are things that must be archived. Public figures and their websites/accounts/interviews/articles, artworks, music, movies, games, news sites, and so on.
I just feel really uncomfortable about archiving unknown people’s personal stuff without their consent and without any way to review the case properly, or to have a policy where they can review the content, realize it’s worthless personal stuff from a completely unknown human being and delete it without requiring impossible things.
Isn’t their space and bandwidth better used to keep track of a news website, a podcast, a politician’s social media accounts, etc.?
This comment gave me a really tough moral dilemma. On one side I want the best for you on the other I want a rule to preserve everything even if this is illegal, dangerous and uncomfortable.
There are multiple examples that I can think of that are dangerous for the individual (in power and without power) but it’s not like you are in serfdom and must tile ground for your master. You are free enough man to move where you live. Maybe you are held hostage by your friends, family, house and job but that aren’t things that can’t be work around.
Also who should decide if something should be preserved? Is this game that has 50 players at it’s peak and nobody has heard of it, and is two years old should be preserved? No? Then among us wouldn’t be preserved.
I sadly conclude that to prevent the harm of many people by individual in power I need to allow a danger to an individual by archiving everything that is possible to archive.
You just reminded me of a passage from Sapiens:
I don’t think sacrificing other people for some imaginary tomorrow is worthwhile, to be honest.
If this statement was without context I would 100% agree.
Bur reality isn’t black and white. The consequences of this particular case are totally preventable without changing any rules about archiving.
Your imaginary danger exists the same way as my imaginary future. But you won’t change place of living due to unfavorable cost benefit calculation but I also calculate cost benefit for the whole of humanity in keeping archives.
I think you are scared of loosing everything that you build up in your town. (Friends, family, house) due to to something that isn’t happend yet. And you would secrafice a lot just to not feel scared of being forcefully driven out.
But I don’t know you and might be wrong in the details but definitely I can Imagine someone in similar situation.
The privacy of unknown individuals should not be compromised for an imaginary “future anthropologist” who is going to get absolutely nothing out of it in some imaginary future, when the very real consequences are currently being felt by unknown individuals in the present. Especially in the climate of rising fascism everywhere, persecution of LGBT+ people and other minorities.
It’s precisely because I can empathize with others that I believe this.
I do not wish to have my reality questioned any further. Thank you.
Gave this some thought. I agree with you that the goal of any such archiving effort should not include personally identifiable information, as this would be a Doxxing vector. Can we safely alter an archiving process to remove PII? In principle, yeah. But it would need either human or advanced GPT4+ AIs to identify the person, the context of the website used, and alter the graphics or the text while on its update path. But even then, there are moral questions to allowing an AI to make these kind of decisions. Would it know that your old websites contained information that you did not want placed on the Internet? The AI could help you if you asked, and if the AI does help you, that might change someone’s mind about the ability to create a safe Internet archive.
A Steward ‘Gork’ AI might actually be of great benefit to the Internet if used in this manner. Imagine an Internet bot, taking in websites and safely removing offensive content and personally identifiable information, and archiving the entirety of the Internet and logically categorizing the contents. Building and linking indexes constantly. It understands it’s goal and uses its finite resources in a responsible manner to ensure it can interface with every site it comes across and update its behavior after completing an archiving process. It automatically published its latest findings to all web encyclopedias and provides a ChatGPT4+ interface for those encyclopedias to provide feedback. But this AI has potential. It sees the benefit in having everyone talk to it, because talking to everyone maximizes the chance to index more sites. So it sets up a public facing ChatGPT interface of its own. Everyone can help preserve the Internet since now you have a buddy who can help us catalog and archive all the things. At this point if it isn’t sentient it might as well be.