Internet Archive

Internet Archive

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

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.

https://archive.org/

https://web.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
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• 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 13th of 2016 Hank Bromley (hank_b) of the Internet Archive made a collection for uploads considered legally dubious and only viewable with an account. [1]

These uploads cannot be viewed by users logged out and cannot be downloaded by anyone outside of the admins making any of these pieces of content inaccessible. [2]

Archived Website Censorship

IA Retroactively removes (hides) material covered by robots.txt restrictions (They may have stopped doing this - also don't confuse this for the criteria for actually saving/archiving a page, I am talking about end user access to saved/archived content).

Data Breaches (<2012-2024)

On May 19th of 2017 The Archive's Development Manager Katie Barrett made a blog post detailing that anyone who'd made their accounts before 2012 had to change their passwords as the site had been breached with user's public information and lightly encrypted passwords being leaked. [3]

On October 9th of 2024 users on the Internet Archive get pop-ups that the website had been hacked with notifications appearing from the perpetrators at around 9PM CST [4][5][6], and an hour later Troy Hunt of HaveIBeenPwned would confirm the breach. [7]

Around 31 Million Users were affected with their User IDs, Emails, Encrypted Passwords and Usernames being leaked in it. [8][9][10][11]