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

No

[musmax]

Email and posts are forever. The faster you grow up on the internets the faster you'll grow up. Actions have consequences and it is by suffering from those that we become more human and less of that thing a 18 year old is. It will be a massive disservice to both the individual and society if we don't have that.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Best Solution

How about restrict internet to 18 years or older.

Re:No

[Viol8]

"Everyone has a chapter in their book they don't real out loud, including you"

Not all of us mate. Sure , I did some dumb stuff but nothing I'd be particularly embarrassed about. If a teen thinks posting pictures of their genitals or a "hilarious" throwing up incident in a bar or whatever isn't going to have future consequences then they're probably so clueless and thick that they're not going to go far in life anyway.

Most teens are sensible, why should be protect the idiot minority from themselves?

Re:No

[RabidReindeer]

The irony is that these days if you let your little darlings wander physical streets unsupervised, they'll come and arrest you and take away your children leaving them traumatized because the police hauled Mommy and Daddy off to jail and the Social Services people told the kiddies that their parents were horrible abusive creatures who deserved never to be allowed to see them again.

For doing what everyone thought was natural 20 years or so ago.

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/...

Re:No

[wues]

This is indeed by Lem. No idea about English translation, but in Polish it was published as short story "Profesor DoÅda" in the volume "Maska" ("The Mask") in 1976. The idea was that energy, matter and information are all equivalent and if you reach critical amount of information it will turn to matter, forming a new Universe separate from ours. The story is grotesque and really funny.

Here's a thought...

[Dutch Gun]

Kids & Teens: Don't post embarrassing photos or videos of yourself online, or put yourself in a position where others can post embarrassing photos or videos of you online. Don't think you can be anonymous online, because someone WILL recognize you or figure out who you are, given enough incentive. Consider it a valuable life lesson that you actually *can't* retract everything you do in life so easily.

Parent: Get involved and teach your children to be responsible online. Just like in the real world, there are rules for behaving safely and responsibly online. When things go public, there's no way to retrieve those images from everyone who may have gotten a copy, and no amount of legislation is going to change that reality, however much some people may wish it.

Legislators: Stop pretending that you can fix all the world's ills with the sweep of a pen. Start learning what IS and ISN'T possible in the online world. Or for God's sake, at least ask one of your younger tech-savvy interns before you make a fool of yourself with this sort of stuff.

Re:Here's a thought...

[Dutch Gun]

Just to be clear, I do have some sympathy for people who are out in public, and are caught in an embarrassing situation not of their own making. Say, for example, a dog playing at the beach tugs at person's swimsuit and pulls it down. Pretty embarrassing, and not exactly anyone's fault. Someone films it with their smartphone and posts it online anonymously for kicks. Your situation is another good example.

This sort of thing can happen much more easily, because nowadays *everyone* has a handy videocamera available right in their smartphone. I'm perfectly fine with laws meant to protect people against that sort of abuse, or to compel services to remove photos or videos of that nature upon request. That being said, everyone has to understand that there's no way to permanently remove data from "the internet", only from a few specific sites. And anyone who downloaded that information could always upload it again. That's the hard reality of the world we live in. The information age provides some amazing benefits, but it certainly has downsides as well.

Part of this is a human problem as well. Who exactly posted these rumors on FB about you? Is passing a law about this going to fix the underlying problem here? That's sort of what I'm getting at. I'm saying that people need to understand that this is the new reality. Part of this needs to be some restraint in people NOT posting unfounded rumors about others online at the drop of a hat. I wouldn't shed a tear if the person who spread those rumors about you got reprimanded or fired because of pulling bullshit like that. Responsibility has to go both ways.

Wrong age

[swillden]

Relatively little of what teens do is going to cause them problems in later life. It's what people do between about 18 and 25 that tends to screw them. Mainly because they're old enough to drink (without having to hide it) but not yet old enough to think (well).

Re:Wrong age

[ScentCone]

This. Nobody is an adult at 18. Not even close. Most people don't have their cognitive act together, and any sort of capacity for rational behavior (if they're ever going to get there) until, these days, they're the better part of 30.

But knowing to not shoot selfies of yourself being a total jackass is something that can make some sense a lot earlier than 18. If some 15 year old can know enough not to drop his pants in front of his grandmother or in front of his classroom at school, he already has what it takes to know not to do it online. He just has to be taught that. Which involves, you know, parents. Who give a damn about their kids' future.

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...

We keep history to learn

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 19, and I have to say this is incredibly moronic. Granted, I've posted tons of embarrassing stuff when I was younger, but that's part of growing up. I learned not do that again and moved on. Just because you said something stupid once doesn't mean people get to remove archived internet events for you. I'm so sick of my worthless pussy generation, always being "triggered" or having their feelings hurt because they're not the center of attention. I mean holy fuck, most of us are in our late teens and early 20s. Grow the fuck up.

Re:Embarrassment

[mwvdlee]

Are employers looking at Facebook also mostly a social thing?
The problem isn't embarrasment, it's judgmental people with the power to affect your live.

Senior Citizens

[Sooner Boomer]

The same rules should apply to old people. I'm getting cranky and I just don't give a fuck sometimes...

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.