Would You Delete Your Internet History?

For several years, I’ve been doing something awful to Helen Lewis. Not me – but another Helen Lewis, an altogether better one. That Helen Lewis was an author who wrote a beautiful memoir called A Time To Speak, and later became an acclaimed choreographer. But she died in 2009 and, as a result, I’m steadily bumping her down the Google results for our shared name.

Of course, some people would welcome that kind of erasure. Last year, a Spanish man called Mario Costeja González sued Google, demanding that the company remove the search results showing a 1998 newspaper article about his money troubles. His victory ushered in ‘the right to be forgotten’, with Google receiving a million requests to remove links since May 2014, and granting 41% of them. The search engine has complained about the amount of admin it now has to do, but it’s a victim of its own success – for many of us, our Google results define us. That is where a potential date, or a potential employer, looks first. Once, our past indiscretions were hidden away in dusty boxes of newspaper clippings, or whispered secrets among our neighbours; now they can be revealed with the click of a mouse.

For that reason, a campaign group called iRights has proposed an extension of the right to be forgotten. Effectively, they want young people to get a nuclear button that deletes everything they have posted about themselves online up to their 18th birthday.

That would have helped 20-year-old Scottish National Party MP Mhairi Black, who was criticised during the General Election for sweary, alcohol-fuelled tweets she had sent as a teenager. These ranged from ‘maths is shite’ to suggesting that Smirnoff Ice ‘was the drink of the gods’ and calling Celtic football team ‘scum’. (She’s right about the second one.) But – and here’s the crucial thing – Black was elected despite those tweets. She told me during the campaign that they embarrassed her, but added, ‘My pal was saying to me: you swore on Twitter; Tony Blair started a war. What bothers folk more?’

That’s why I’m not convinced we need a nuclear button to delete our internet histories. Cultural values change – if a whole generation enters the job market with embarrassing Facebook photos and ill-advised blog rants still visible to their employers, we’ll all have to relax about them. And anyway, teenagers are often more savvy about the consequences of leaving an online trail than 20- and 30-somethings. After all, they know their parents might sneakily check up on them. That’s the reason for the popularity of apps like Snapchat – which deletes your photo message after the recipient has seen it – or Whisper, where you confess your secrets anonymously. Many teenagers are only too aware of the dangers of leaving a permanent record of what they’ve been up to online.

The founder of iRights, Beeban Kidron, says that her plan is ‘not all about embarrassment, or covering up supposed “transgressions” – it’s also about curating your own online identity’. There she has a point – privacy settings on social networks are often fiddly and confusing for all of us. How many times have you wondered why a friend of a friend is commenting on your Facebook photos? Internet companies want to hoover up as much data about us as they can, so they can target adverts more precisely and that gives them a huge amount of power over our personal information. The most obvious example of what can go wrong is the hacking of the adultery website Ashley Madison, where millions of users have been threatened with the publication of their names (alerting their spouses). We can’t expect to control what other people say about us online, but the internet giants should help us keep a tighter grip on our own information. That means more simple privacy controls, and better security measures.

Ultimately, though, there’s a bigger question. We need to decide what kind of memory we want the internet to have – should it be perfect, a historical record kept for all time? Or should it be like the human brain, which gradually overwrites old experiences with new information? And we need to change too: if our past lives are going to follow us around forever, we don’t need just the right to be forgotten. We need the right to be forgiven.

WEB WHITEWASHING

If your sweaty teen Facebook photos are just too much for you, you might want to look to an online ‘clean slate’ service. New kid on this particular block is US company ReputationDefender, who have just announced they’ve raised £10 million in venture capital for their project, which will ‘whitewash’ your online presence. They monitor websites for negative mentions and flood the web with positive info about their clients. And last month, a similar company, Reputation Experts, launched in Australia, saying, ‘People put up false Facebooks, restaurants put bad reviews of their rivals online and, of course, people in the public eye might once have done something embarrassing and that’s always the first thing that comes up on Google.’