Many criminal records, petty or otherwise, are public record. When archived, expunged or dismissed infractions never truly become that. A traffic violation or other petty misdemeanor from 20 years ago, that has been expunged from official record, can show up on a background check because companies archive public data. So, there is a flip side to this.
Hypothetically:
-Government leader says they're nuking data
-Mad rush to back up data through other means
-Government leader declares they've 'transferred the cost of maintaining data out of government, thus making for a smaller, more efficient, government'
Let’s say an individual posted identifying or incriminating information online, inadvertently or intentionally, in a public place.
Then a third party decides to store it, and possibly make it accessible to others.
If the original self doxxing user then pulled the original dox, but was unable to scrub the rest, would that information still be considered public, or would it be private? Was it ever truly public? Or private for that matter?
Digital Archivists: Protecting Public Data from Erasure
(spectrum.ieee.org)195 points by rbanffy 2 April 2025 | 45 comments
Comments
Internet Archive et al. made noise and promises but told volunteers to stop because they couldn't actually handle the ingest.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Archiveteam/comments/1jbgycm/us_gov...
These folks made a notable effort.
https://webrecorder.net/blog/2025-03-25-govarchive-us-and-mi...
Once you format shift, you will always be format shifting.
Keep your originals whenever you can.
I hate everything about this.
Let’s say an individual posted identifying or incriminating information online, inadvertently or intentionally, in a public place.
Then a third party decides to store it, and possibly make it accessible to others.
If the original self doxxing user then pulled the original dox, but was unable to scrub the rest, would that information still be considered public, or would it be private? Was it ever truly public? Or private for that matter?
This stuff is very important to talk about so I hope that this submission by rbanffy isn't also flagged.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43543075