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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."
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."
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.
See https://archive.org/about/faqs...
If you want to delete your site from the wayback machine, all you have to do is ask them. They are not obligated to keep any page in the archive, whether it contains "evidence" or not. You can also exclude ia_archiver user agent in your robots.txt, which will prevent your site from being indexed in the first place. This way you will not even have to ask them.
It wasnt malware, in the American language it would be called something like a "analytics's and management platform, with realtime reporting and active asset monitoring and protection"
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"...
Having a pre-existing relationship doesn't make anything more or less stalkery.
I'll just go out on a limb here and say that I'm sure this law varies state to state.
... how do you "stalk" someone you are already married to?
Gee, I dunno, maybe you could "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".
If the owner of a particular domain wishes that the HTML documents available through that domain be made available indefinitely, even after the domain owner's insolvency, what should the domain owner do to prevent the domain from being snapped up by a third party that sets robots.txt?
I don't like that scenario and, probably, most of people doesn't do either. But it seems an unavoidable drawback of this whole approach. This is a private company with private interests and obligations (not precisely providing a public service for any random internet user) which, as such, can do whatever they want with their data. There seems to only be one limitation to that absolute power: what the person/company referred by that data wants to do with it. Bear in mind that we aren't talking about the typical user-opens-account->generates-data->user-tells-how-to-use-data, but about systematic collections of data which, in most of the cases, happen without the given user knowledge. How to know who is the owner now and yesterday? How to deal with eventual ownership conflicts?, etc. Everything would become too complicated, too invasive (all this additional personal information would have to be stored), etc. They might have chosen a more conservative alternative like deleting only the current files, but preferred to make sure that no information without a clear permission will be kept.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
They're erring on the side of caution, because they don't want lawsuits.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
If you think your partner is cheating isn't that enough to end the relationship? Why go to the effort of obtaining proof?
If you find out your partner isn't cheating, how does that resolve the feelings that made you suspect infidelity in the first place?
So you have two modes, absolute blind trust and bail at the first sign of anything that manages to wiggle through it? Your spouse is human, humans lie, humans do selfish things, humans make mistakes.
Your spouse doesn't need to know your every thought or action but if there is something you are making available for literally any other third party (network provider, government, friend, etc) and you don't think marrying a person implicitly and automatically amounts to granting consent to that plus more you'd never share with another party it's you who should probably just get a divorce.
There are very important and obvious reasons for that, not the least of which is if you are unconscious your partner has the right to give access to all that information to someone else and also make choices like whether or not a doctor should do something that will kill you if you've eaten X or been exposed to Y in the past 24hrs.
There are paranoid partners out there but having a doubt or suspicion in an innately fallible thing isn't the issue. Not seeing your partner as someone you ultimately trust is a marriage killer. I might write something in a message I'd rather my wife not see and I'd be annoyed if she were looking in my messages with out some sort of reason but of course she has the right to look at them without legal consequences. Your spouse can give consent to a law enforcement officer to search your possessions and information waiving your right to privacy but you think they shouldn't be legally entitled to waive that the same right when they have need?
In my house the bar for looking at one another's text messages is at the "oh yeah, I remember (s)he sent that address I'm trying to find to Joe last week."