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Was there something in particular I said that you felt was defending it with "literal religious fervor and dismissing all criticism out of hand", or were you referring to my grandparent? I don't think I dismissed anything out of hand, I specifically acknowledged both the value of ephemerality and the point that traditional libraries are curated. I agree that there is a danger that people may not realize how public and permanent the things they published to Tumblr were, or how dangerous it can be to do so (and I downvoted a sibling comment dismissing this danger). However, I think you and I have different threat models. In my mind, archiving PII that is intentionally published is not particularly harmful because most lay people do, in fact, understand that their avatar, username, and by default, posts are public on Tumblr. They have had the opportunity to remove that information this whole time, and they still do, Archive.org removes stuff if you ask them. By contrast, lay people have no mental model for what kind of information is incidentally collected nor how dangerous or benign it is. Certainly, lay people also can and do misjudge how public and how dangerous the things they intentionally publish are, but the gap is far, far less than incidental information. "Would you tell a stranger this" or "would you write this on a bathroom wall" are decent heuristics: the only difference in danger between text written on a bathroom wall and written on Tumblr is due solely to the potentially wider reach and possibility of even going viral on Tumblr. (Photos, of course, can also subtly compromise privacy in ways surprising to a lay person, but the gap is still much smaller than incidental information.) In my threat model, that gap in understanding is much, much more dangerous than the intrinsic danger of PII. That's why I think that as long as Archive.org has a usable removal process, I think pretty much all the danger is in surveillance capitalism's collection of incidental information, not Archive.org's permanent record of intentionally publicized information. |