On Tue, Mar 28, 2017 at 6:51 PM, TeoZ via cctalk <cctalk@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.
