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Comment by proaralyst | Hacker News Reader

I don't think they purge the archives, I think they just don't serve them on the wayback machine.

Yes. Instead of deleting anything, I think the Archive tends to mark stuff as "do not show this for a few decades."

Do you have a source for this? I didn’t know that but it’s very interesting – a good compromise between the interests of current website owners[1] and future historians.

[1]: Sure, some people just want to hide embarrassing or incriminating content, but there’s also cases where someone is being stalked or harassed based on things they shared online, and hiding those things from Archive users may mitigate that.

Generally when items are "taken down" from the Internet Archive, they just stop being published, and are not deleted.

I don't think it's mentioned in an official document, but it's usually referred to as "darking".

It probably safe to assume that the same concept applies to the Wayback Machine as to the rest of IA.

Edit: Here's a page that indirectly conveys some information about it: https://archive.org/details/IA_books_QA_codes

I thought I'd read it in a blog post by Jason Scott at textfiles.com, but I couldn't find a reference quickly. It could have come from conversation, as I've visited the Internet Archive a few times.

Which won't be legal, it seems if serving EU based users, and keep PII on any other EU users.

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