Comment by bastawhiz
3 years ago
Is it ethical to keep snapshots of pages doxing people? Or dumps of bank account numbers? There's no way to both preserve that content publicly and also protect the victims.
3 years ago
Is it ethical to keep snapshots of pages doxing people? Or dumps of bank account numbers? There's no way to both preserve that content publicly and also protect the victims.
There were no dumps of bank account numbers. As far as I saw, Kiwi Farms users posted only publicly-available info about thread subjects. In my opinion, certain categories of public yet personally-identifying information should be covered by US law in a way similar to HIPAA. However, that is not currently the case.
Also, info like someone's phone number and home address are only a click away once you have their full name and approximate age/geographic location, at least for people haven't taken extraordinary steps to limit discoverability on Spokeo or White Pages. People post full names and locations to Twitter all the time. They call it "unmasking" when it's someone the ruling consensus dislikes, while they know the info will be used to look up the "dox." This is not Twitter or Kiwi Farms' fault. It is the result of flaws in our legal system which allow sites like Spokeo and White pages to operate.
It's easily verifiable that bank details were shared on KF. It's also easily verifiable to see that non-public information about folks was posted, especially when real details were posted about folks commonly known by their pseudonyms online.
Whether it's legal or not is unimportant. My question is for the internet archive: is it ethical for them to knowingly rehost dumps of PII? Just because it's public doesn't mean it's right for them to treat it like any other page. The goal of the KF users is to harass by putting that information out there: if IA rehosts that intentionally, they're making an active choice to further the goals of KF users.
>It's easily verifiable that bank details were shared on KF.
I see you've backed off from "bank account numbers" to "bank account details," perhaps after Googling the same Twitter screenshots I just found in an attempt to verify your claim. Those screenshots show a user describing a hacked bank account's balance and recent purchases. That's pretty bad; hacking into bank accounts is very illegal. The individual who broke into the account very likely committed a crime. Regardless, the screenshots don't show any credentials or account numbers. I'm not sure if posting someone's bank balance is illegal, but I'm guessing it isn't; maybe it depends on how it was obtained... don't know, not a lawyer.
Of course, the screenshot is totally unverifiable now that KF is wiped from the Internet Archives, which is the point of the submitted link.
> It's easily verifiable that bank details were shared on KF.
How? The site is down and now the archives are too. This strikes me as a bizarre lie.