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 ci...@xenosoft.com
