Families First: Protecting the People Behind the Archive

The Iran Massacre was created to preserve evidence: names, photographs, dates, places, sources and the records of people killed during the crackdown on Iran's Dey 1404 protests.

But preserving evidence creates another responsibility.

The people in this archive are not entries in a database.

They were someone's child, parent, sibling, partner, friend or colleague.

Their families may know things no published list knows. They may have photographs that have never appeared online. They may know that a name is misspelled, a town is wrong or a date has been recorded incorrectly.

And sometimes they may not want something published at all.

For that reason, families are not treated simply as another source for the archive.

They have a special place in how it works.

The family knows the person, not just the record

Human-rights reports are essential to this project.

So are news reports, photographs, videos, eyewitness accounts and other documented sources.

But none of them replaces the people who actually knew the person.

A list might tell us a name and a city.

A family might tell us how that name was really written, where their loved one grew up, what they studied, what they loved, which photograph actually looks like them — or that a photograph we have is the wrong person entirely.

That distinction matters.

The archive exists to preserve people's identities, not to take ownership of them.

Correcting the record

Families can send corrections or additional information about a person already in the archive.

That might be a corrected name.

An age.

A town.

A date.

A news report or death notice we have not seen.

Or a few words about the person themselves.

Nothing changes automatically.

A member of the team reads the submission and checks it before information on the public record is changed.

The aim is simple: make it easy to correct the archive without making it easy for someone to maliciously rewrite it.

Photographs and memories

A name tells us that somebody existed.

A photograph reminds us that they lived.

Families can submit photographs they are comfortable making public and can share memories or information that helps preserve something of the person behind the record.

But permission matters.

Material sent privately is not automatically treated as material that can be published publicly.

A family should be able to help preserve someone's story without losing control of everything it shares in the process.

A family can ask us to hide something

Preservation does not always mean publication.

There may be photographs a family no longer wants online.

There may be a personal detail that creates a risk for someone still living.

There may be information that is wrong, distressing or should never have been public.

A family can therefore ask for a photograph, a detail or an entire record to be hidden.

When such a request is made through the family system, the material is hidden while the request is reviewed.

That principle is important.

When the choice is between temporarily losing a piece of information and potentially exposing or harming a family, the archive should protect the person first.

You do not have to identify yourself

Sending a correction does not require an account.

It does not require a real name.

Contact information is optional.

After submitting information, the sender receives a private code that can be used to follow the submission.

A family account is also optional and does not require an email address.

These choices are deliberate.

People communicating with an archive about killings, arrests and state repression may themselves face risks.

A system built for them should not demand more personal information than it actually needs.

Photographs can reveal more than people realise

Modern photographs can contain hidden metadata, including information about where an image was taken.

That can be useful in an investigation.

It can also create a security risk.

The family submission system therefore has removal of location information from photographs enabled by default.

This is a small technical feature with a larger principle behind it:

evidence should be preserved without unnecessarily exposing the person who supplied it.

Privacy starts before the submission form

The same approach extends to the wider website.

Reading The Iran Massacre does not require an email address.

The site says it does not retain visitors' raw IP addresses. For abuse prevention, it uses a one-way scrambled value rather than storing an address that can simply be read back.

Third-party videos and social-media posts are also not automatically loaded. A visitor chooses when to load them, at which point the external platform's own privacy rules may apply.

There are also safety tools intended for people who may be browsing in sensitive circumstances, including a quick-exit function, a discreet browser-tab title and an option to clear locally saved site information and leave.

No technical system can promise perfect safety.

The site does not pretend otherwise.

But reducing unnecessary collection matters.

We do not ask a family to prove their grief in public

One of the principles of the family system is particularly important:

Families are not asked to publicly prove a death or publicly prove that they are related to the person.

That does not mean information is accepted without review.

It means verification should not require a grieving relative to expose identity documents, home addresses, phone numbers or details about living relatives to the world.

The archive says it does not publish those details.

There is a difference between verifying information and demanding that somebody surrender their privacy.

Why this matters for an archive like ours

Human-rights archives face a difficult tension.

The record needs to be strong enough to withstand scrutiny.

Sources need to be visible.

Claims need to be checked.

Errors need to be corrected.

But maximum publication is not the same thing as maximum transparency.

A home address does not make a death better documented.

The identity of a vulnerable relative does not make a photograph more authentic.

A phone number does not strengthen a historical record.

Sometimes responsible documentation means knowing what not to publish.

The archive belongs to the truth — but the person still belongs to themselves

The Iran Massacre is trying to build a permanent record of what happened during and after the Dey 1404 crackdown.

For that record to mean something, it has to preserve more than numbers.

It has to preserve names.

Faces.

Places.

Stories.

Sources.

And the distinction between what we know and what we do not yet know.

But it also has to remember that the people represented here are not the property of the archive.

Neither are their families.

When a family helps us correct a name, find a photograph or understand who somebody was, they make the historical record stronger.

When they tell us something should not be public, we have a responsibility to listen.

Because protecting the record is important.

Protecting the people behind it matters just as much.