Internet Archive

The Internet Archive is an American non-profit digital library founded in 1996 to provide free "universal access to all knowledge" and preserve digital history.

Internet Archive

Basic information
Founded	1996
Legal structure	Private
Industry	Digital Library
Official website	https://archive.org/

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

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This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Learn more ▼

Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How you can help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

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Consumer-impact summary

[TBA]

Incidents

Login-only items for legally dubious content (2016-present)

On January 13, 2016, Hank Bromley (hank_b) of the Internet Archive created a collection of uploads considered legally dubious and only viewable with an account.

These uploads cannot be viewed by logged-out users and cannot be downloaded by anyone except the admins, making any of these pieces of content inaccessible.

Archived Website Censorship

The Internet Archive retroactively removes or hides material covered by robots.txt restrictions.^{[citation needed]}

Data Breaches (2012-2024)

On May 19, 2017, The Archive's Development Manager Katie Barrett made a blog post detailing that anyone who had created their account before 2012 had to change their password as the site had been breached with user's public information and lightly encrypted passwords being leaked.

On October 9, 2024, users on the Internet Archive got pop-ups that the website had been hacked with notifications appearing from the perpetrators at around 9PM CST, and an hour later Troy Hunt of HaveIBeenPwned confirmed the breach.

Around 31 million users were affected with their user IDs, Emails, encrypted passwords and usernames being leaked.