When the Archive Team archived all publicly accessible content on berries.space, not only did they not notify any of the users, but they didn’t provide any means for the users to opt out. […] The Archive Team has a rant on their wiki about how they despise robots.txt, a text file that allows you to specify whether or not you’d like parts of your website to be archived or crawled by bots. […] One would think that a group of people dedicated to preserving data on the internet would also have some respect for the data’s owner, but apparently not. […] “berries had A LOT of minors who didn’t give any kind of consent to have their posts archived.” […] There are many situations in which someone would not want the public to know that they’re trans. If a trans woman had previously posted somewhere using her deadname, this would not only out her as trans, but reveal her deadname to the public, which can be a major source of dysphoria. If the Archive Team’s “never post anything you don’t want to be known forever” advice is to be taken, then she would have to somehow know in advance that she wasn’t male, and know never to post anything using her real name until she realised that she was trans. This is, of course, ridiculous. This is a case where mass public data collection is dangerous to the target’s well-being. Just because something’s publicly available doesn’t mean people want it harvested and stored forever by a dedicated group of data archivists. Posting your phone number on a billboard isn’t consenting to having your phone number posted online by an archival team. Neither is protesting in public, or having a conversation in public, or going skinny-dipping in public, or walking past a CCTV camera in public. Being in public does not mean you automatically consent to having your activities archived.
Secondo me abbiamo a che fare con un gruppo di persone che si è semplificata la ragione d’esistere con una semplice ideologia: If you don’t want people to have your data, don’t put it online. Ignorando quanto tale ideologia crea sofferenze per minoranze di persone… come è praticamente sempre il caso quando si semplifica la realtà. Altri esempi di ideologia semplificante:
- la cooptazione e risultante oligarchia
- l’idea che tutti i problemi sociali si risolvono con l’empatia (e al contempo esibirne zero)
- la democrazia rappresentativa e le costituzioni che la stabiliscono
- la democrazia diretta e l’uno vale uno
- la libertà d’espressione per sdoganare menzogna, diffamazione e revisionismo storico
- la negazione di opzioni etiche con la scusa di una presunta inevitabilità scientifica o fattuale delle cose
- to be continued…