The Wayback Machine is Deleting Evidence of Malware Sold To Stalkers (vice.com)

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is a service that preserves web pages. But the site has been deleting evidence of companies selling malware to illegally spy on spouses, Motherboard reported Tuesday. From the report: The company in question is FlexiSpy, a Thailand-based firm which offers desktop and mobile malware. The spyware can intercept phone calls, remotely turn on a device's microphone and camera, steal emails and social media messages, as well as track a target's GPS location. Previously, pages from FlexiSpy's website saved to the Wayback Machine showed a customer survey, with over 50 percent of respondents saying they were interested in a spy phone product because they believe their partner may be cheating. That particular graphic was mentioned in a recent New York Times piece on the consumer spyware market.

In another example, a Wayback Machine archive of FlexiSpy's homepage showed one of the company's catchphrases: "Many spouses cheat. They all use cell phones. Their cell phone will tell you what they won't." Now, those pages are no longer on the Wayback Machine. Instead, when trying to view seemingly any page from FlexiSpy's domain on the archiving service, the page reads "This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."

Comments

Yep, that's how it works

[Anonymous Coward]

It is very annoying, but that's how it works. The worst is when a site that is owned by an entity who goes out of business is preserved by the wayback machine, but then another entity gets the domain, puts up a robots.txt and there goes all the history.
For all the good it is doing, it would be so much better if it did not apply robots.txt retroactively. It doesn't even make sense, robots.txt says "bots stay out", which is not nearly the same as "bots, forget whatever you had visited in the past"...

Re:Yep, that's how it works

[bill_mcgonigle]

Almost certainly this is how archive.org manages to not get sued out of existence by malicious litigants who want to hide their misdeeds.

If you can figure out how to make the legal system non-abusive, let's do that and then I'm sure archive.org will keep all their old crawls available.

In the meantime let's support them for staying around.

Re:robots.txt

[gnick]

The thing about preserving data is that you need to do it before the court order to be of any use.