PreOwned machine privacy - Was: Acclaim Entertainment Indy (with data, emails, etc) on eBay

[Fred Cisin]

>> How do you feel about reading dead presidents personal letters? At some
>> point personal information ends up being historic information.

The item in question seems to be ten years old.
THAT doesn't sound like "historical" can or should over-ride current 
rights holders.

At some point, "grave robbing" turns into "respectable archeology", but 
this doesn't seem to have reached that point.  THESE "presidents" are 
still alive, and their PERSONAL letters are not yet "history".

On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, Tony Aiuto via cctalk wrote:
> "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.

There is a concept of "in the public eye" that takes away most privacy of 
things done in public, or as official actions.   Nixon's Oval Office 
actions did not have an expectation of privacy, but his bedroom did.
(Not that that would be interesting, I'm willing to believe from his 
values and attitudes that Nixon was a virgin)

SOME privacy ceases on death.  SOME lasts until it is clear that the 
actions are "historical" rather than "personal"

>> (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.

If it is a person who is alive, or RECENTLY deceased (Jobs?), it should be 
returned to them or their estate. 
Long ago, no problem.

There is not a clear line to draw.

>> 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.

Who said, "the internet is written in sand"?

> 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, not while they (or theirs) are still around to be affected by the 
release.

> 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.

Al's link was for Turok source code.  It came out in 2008.  I seriously 
doubt that it could be considered to be "abandoned".  Even if acquired in 
good faith through oversight or accident, it would not be appropriate to 
release somebody's source code.


--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com