How we treat the personal data in this collection, and how to ask us to review, correct, or remove material about you.
The Internet History Initiative preserves early-network communications — mailing lists, Usenet, and technical fora — that were public when written. Some of it names people who are still living. We keep this material for historical research and archiving in the public interest, and we try to hold ourselves to the spirit of European data-protection law as our floor, because many of the people in the record are European.
We preserve the historical content and the record of who said what. Our standard is to suppress the sharpest personal-contact details — home phone numbers and home addresses — because those are a risk to a person and add nothing to the history. That suppression pass is being rolled out across the collection now; until it completes everywhere, the removal channel below is the fast path for anything that concerns you.
You can ask us to review, correct, or remove material about you. We read every request, we log it, and the default answer to a good-faith personal request is to honour it. To reach us, email the curator — that is the removal and redact-by-request channel, and a person reads it.
The Internet History Initiative is a United States organisation. The collection is served from Amazon Web Services in the European Union (eu-central). We are a research prototype, not a registered data-protection controller discharging full statutory duties — but we take the obligations seriously and this notice is how we mean to honour them.
This is a plain-language notice for a research prototype, not legal advice. See also our privacy notice, content & copyright statement, preserved-vs-machine-generated note, and terms of use.