UK Campaign Wants 18-Year-Olds To Be Able To Delete Embarrassing Online Past

An anonymous reader writes: People should be allowed to delete embarrassing social media posts when they reach adulthood, UK internet rights campaigners are urging. The iRights coalition has set out five rights which young people should expect online, including being able to easily edit or delete content they have created, and to know who is holding or profiting from their information. Highlighting how campaigners believe adults should not have to bear the shame of past immaturity, iRights also wants children to be protected from illegal or distressing pages; to be digitally literate; and be able to make informed and conscious choices.

Comments

You can't take the pee out of the pool

[Dahamma]

Giving proper citation, my favorite quote on the topic, from News Radio:

Joe: You can’t take something off the Internet. It’s like taking pee out of a swimming pool.

Which seems surprising appropriate for kids doing stupid things...

Re:No

[xaxa]

A young woman was elected as an MP in Scotland, regardless of the "colourful" Tweets she'd written since she was 14: http://www.express.co.uk/news/...

Wikipedia says "as most of them were a few years old they were generally ascribed to immaturity and did not appear to do any significant damage": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

What we have vs. what we want

[oneandoneis2]

A conversation about the internet that is long, long overdue: Is what we *have* what we *want*, and if not, what can be done about it?

What we HAVE is a global network that will never, ever let you forget that silly thing you did whilst young and drunk that everyone thought was so hilarious at the time.

Is that really what we want?

Something as simple as dropping obscure older material down the search rankings would have a whole bunch of potentially nice effects. It would make the embarassments of your past harder to find. It would make shitty documentation for older programming languages to finally get superceded by the more modern stuff (if you've never encountered some novice following "best practice" from a document that was written when CGI ruled the web, I envy you). It would leave the content as available as ever, but drop the older and largely less-relevant stuff out of circulation.

The instant flood of responses being trotted out here along the lines of "Teh internet nevar forgets! n00b! l0l!!" are a sad reflection of how little thought people want to give a genuinely interesting question: Is the internet that's evolved over the past few decades really as good as it can be? And I'll be honest, if you really can't think of a single thing that could be done to improve it, I submit you're too ignorant to have an opinion on the subject.

So if we assume that some changes *could* make it better.. what's your proposal for deciding what those changes are, and how they should be made? Right now, the only mechanism going seems to be not-very-well-informed politicians proposing laws and waiting for them to be either passed or laughed down.

If you've got some ingenious way of working out how to make things better, start talking about it. Otherwise, maybe just sit down and shut up whilst other people try.