Talk:Internet Archive

I'm really glad that somebody made an article on the Internet Archive. It's a really important part of the Internet as a whole, since it makes people understand the permanence of online data. To add to this, I don't think of people not wanting previous versions of their website being made publicly available as an ethical issue. The focus of the Internet Archive, as related to ethics, should be to help people understand how permanent and how large the Internet is as a whole. Everything you put on the Internet should be understood as available for any person to download. If you've posted something on the Internet already, then you should understand that you'll probably never be ever to redact that information. The best example of this is the peer-to-peer file sharing network. Every time someone puts a file up for download on a peer-to-peer file network, that user should understand that they basically just made millions of copies of that file in an (figurative) industrial copy machine. As soon as one person downloads that file, then that file is available from one more source. This can happen over and over until there are millions or even billions of points of origin for a particular file. This just illustrates the power of a connected network, but the point is that once something is on the Internet, then it is there for good. If you don't want people to see something on the Internet, then your best bet is to never post it in the first place.

-Ben Asher