28 Mar
2017
28 Mar
'17
6:42 p.m.
On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 6:51 PM, TeoZ via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
How do you feel about reading dead presidents personal
letters? At some
point personal information ends up being historic information.
If there is money (or more money) to be made associating a Computer to a
company or specific somewhat famous people then sellers will play this
angle for all it is worth. Anything done on company machines *is not
private to begin with.* What exactly are we going to learn other then
people asking for vacation days, so and so is a shitty boss, the company
probably used some pirated software, and early artwork or code for games
might have been pretty shitty.
"not private to begin with" is a conveniently loose interpretation of the
law. What you do on a company computer is certainly available information
to the company - I won't argue that. You can not, however, conflate that
with the many things that might be stored on company computers are
protected from disclosure outside the company and individual. A
conversation with HR about recovery from your alcoholism would certainly be
protected from disclosure.
I get computers all the time with hard drive intact
full of company data
(some defunct, others not) and peoples personal files, music, videos, and
photos. I don't bother looking at any of it, only backing up hard to find
drivers or software keys then wiping the drive. If I did come across a user
that was famous (or infamous) I would probably preserve it (remove the
drive and store it somewhere) while going about my hobby interest with the
machine.
Everything we do today is digital, sooner or later there will be no
written records at all. In the distant future historians will want to know
what we were doing in 2017 and they will have nothing to go by since all
the websites will be long gone and all our files will have been erased or
saved using backup methods nobody can make heads or tales of let alone find
the programs that can read the files and computers that the programs can
run on.
Maybe the wayback machine will keep this all, but that is not irrelevant to
this thread.
So I think a small random fraction of users lives
should be around to
learn from.
But we are not talking about users from the distant past. We are talking
about people who are still alive today - and probably discoverable with an
easy web search. We should respect their privacy.