The point is most feeds do not have all of their historical posts. Google Reader preserved old posts in the feeds. ArchiveTeam is taking our OPMLs and getting a copy of Reader's archive before it is taken down.
If you plug in a feed in InoReader, you get thousands of items from the past. It seems they are fetching the historical feeds (I can't tell how far back they go).
But why would ArchiveTeam wants to preserve the historical items in a feed if the feed does not belong to them in the first place (neither did it belong to Google)?
No, there is a difference. An old book at the brink of extinction still belongs to you. You can get third party services to preserve the book for you with the stipulation that your preservation work and the book carries decent privacy rights (it won't be broadcast to the world what you're doing). Remember the old days when you would go to a store to develop your camera roll? The service implied that your picture content is between you and the developer of the film.
It's fine if people don't see any privacy implication here by submitting their reading collection. But as far as my single individual point is concerned, I don't see why I should upload my OPML for the sake of preservation. I have hard time uploading it to any other Google replacement out there trying to compete.
Oh, so you're not really worried about people downloading the content of the blogs, you just don't want anyone to connect the list of blogs to you? Well, you can just take the URLs out of the OPML file, and submit them one at a time. You can even use different IP addresses if you're that paranoid.
Several thinks ArchiveTeam have grabbed a lot more historical than what's available at for example InoReader. I personally think so as well.
There's also no telling if InoReader is open for grabbing what they've grabbed already again. Meaning it's potentially behind closed doors.
ArchiveTeam submits the data to Internet Archive, which anyone can upload and download from. This data is continously being uploaded and made public and free. See https://archive.org/details/archiveteam_greader for example.
Anyone can do anything with that data. Your OPML files are not being submitted though. That's also being said on the linked site for this item.
