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If you look at the fact, that Google CEO Eric Schmidt actually recommends to teenagers, to change their name at the age of 18 just to escape the online artefact

If you look at the fact, that Google CEO Eric Schmidt actually recommends to teenagers, to change their name at the age of 18 just to escape the online artefacts of their young years[1], there are actually strong arguments to have a "right to be forgotten". As we are moving forward to a society, where everything we do is shared online, not only by us but also by our friends, we suddenly loose the control over how we are portrayed. Of course there is the argument that this has been true with classic media, but from personal experience you always have the chance to rerecord something you said on a interview if it's not live and I pre read a majority of all print articles and interviews, because newspaper have high quality standards and try hard to get everything right. As copyright holders are (quite successfully) lobbying to enforce their rights to their content globally, we as a society should enforce our rights on how we are portrait globally. This should not be exclusive to europeans and european cyber space, everyone should enjoy the freedom to decide which parts of his past should be forgotten. [1]http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-s_n_684031.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/16/google-ceo-eric-sch...

maxerickson 11y ago
That's not quite what he said: Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites. "I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," he adds. "I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things," he says. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487049011045754232...

maxerickson 11y ago

That's not quite what he said: Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites. "I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," he adds. "I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things," he says. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487049011045754232...