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

robots.txt

[Thad Boyd]

The Wayback Machine obeys robots.txt, even retroactively. If a site puts up a robots.txt file, archive.org will remove old versions of the site.

Re:robots.txt

[jythie]

It is not all that mysterious that such a policy or mechanism exists, but it still highlight's the piece's argument that we need more archives since a single point of failure is, well, a single point of failure. I remember growing up people talking about how 'the internet is forever' and 'once it is out there it is always there', but over the decades one slowly finds more and more things that seem to be gone for good if they fail to be popular enough to keep spreading.

Re:robots.txt

[rahvin112]

The internet archive (Wayback Machine) does not delete the data for sites with robots.txt that restrict data access. It simply marks the pages as unavailable if it already has them. Now I don't know if they will download new copies once the robots.txt is changed but they don't delete data they already have.