Medium tries to prevent people reading deleted articles on the Wayback Machine?

Who cares? Me posting my (very German) name and address on somebody else's website (blog comment, forum or whatever) doesn't magically make that person have to comply with GDPR.

According to [1] the law applies to:

1.) a company or entity which processes personal data as part of the activities of one of its branches established in the EU, regardless of where the data is processed; or

2.) a company established outside the EU offering goods/services (paid or for free) or monitoring the behaviour of individuals in the EU.

The internet archive doesn't offer goods or services in the EU (if you want to know how that's defined you have to read the actual law I'm afraid) and they're certainly not "monitoring the behaviour of individuals in the EU".

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data-protection/refo...

Ireland's language is actually Gaelic.

It's the only country in the EU that does not require it's language in translations because even in Ireland nearly no one speaks it.

> If no one can read an a book what good is it?

Plenty of good. As a writer myself, sometimes just having these thoughts put out into form is a very gratifying process. When the inspiration hits you, nothing feels worse than not being able to express these thoughts and feelings in a way that feels appropriate.

Likewise, sometimes people write dumb things in a fit of passion. They write something that is a blemish on their otherwise fine history or that no longer reflects what they believe anymore.

While I'm on the side of the Internet Archive here, I can definitely appreciate that it's not an open and shut case. Sometimes the yearning for information to be free is at odds with our want for privacy. Tools like Medium, Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are like the gun in the house to someone suicidal (to use a very bad analogy) - an easy and convenient tool that allows for a very bad spur of the moment decision to be made.

I know I've done stupid things on games and on message boards in the past, and I'm only so lucky that this data likely isn't available anymore. Some of it was me being a dumb kid. Some of it was me just being an angry kid, but I am 100% grateful that this information is only remember by myself and a handful of others. A very different past me had a very stringent set of beliefs which I now have come to accept were very bad beliefs, and I did bad things in general as a result of them.

Is it really fair that I have the benefit that time forgot all these dumb things I've done simply because I was born before a time when Twitter/Facebook were common place? Before data permanence was really possible on a global scale? I'm open to the idea of some review on archiving data like this; I want the Internet Archive to be able to archive this stuff, but it would be really nice if there was a way to vault it for a reasonable period of time as well by request. Otherwise, you end up in a position where no one wants to write or produce or do anything in a fit of passion as a result of knowing that everything is permanently preserved.

I don't have an answer aside from "vaulting" the data, and I don't think that's a good answer. But I also don't think it's black and white like you're trying to make it.

robots.txt is really only supposed to be used for blocking the Internet Archives first snapshot, and not to remove existing snapshots – and even this might not be the case in the future as they try to preserve most snapshots. They made a few policy changes last year[1] to how they handle robots.txt files, to handle cases where a domain is sold and a new robots.txt file would result in deleting old data among other things.

[1]: https://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/robots-txt-meant-for-sea...

However from experience GPDR will also be abused by jobsworths to avoid doing something either through laziness or for more suspect reasons.

Just like H&S and the Data Protection act are abused today.