Clarification - we're not archive.org. Archive Team and Internet Archive are completely separate.

And we're only archiving things that "any guy on the internet" can see. If someone can access the messages simply by joining a group (with no moderator approval), I'd argue it's fair game.

We're not going to be unreasonable, though. If something private slips through and we receive a takedown request from the author, we typically remove it.

Just wondering, if the author of a post or the administrator of a group makes a takedown request regarding non-private* info, would you delete it?

* and by that I mean something that is not a telephone number, an address, a real life name, and other similar things.

Also, I am looking at https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Mastodon and some jobs there (such as berries.space) give 404 when I try to download the data. Do you have any idea why that could be?

But the data will be going to Archive.org, correct?

Yep. That's where they upload everything.

Many groups are public. Many have owners that requested the group be archived.

Yahoo Groups can be configured to allow public access.

They are only archiving data on publicly accessible groups - many of which contain lots of discussions worth archiving.

> what is essentially private communications

If they have access to it, it is not private.