1. Archive.org -- kind of kills the whole "delete my past" idea.
2. Even if it were possible, what about personal responsibility? Why is it a good thing that your past can simply be erased? If you're running for office and it turns out that when you were in college you had lots of crazy coke parties and posted them online, I want to know that and hear you explain it.
I just don't see a strong argument here for why we need to be able to hide what we once thought should be public.
I didn't say delete. I specifically say I would like to annotate any personal data of me on the web with my preference for public release. My preferences may change over time.
I'm not asking to change the way the internet works or to pass any kind of law or anything. I'm simply purposing a standard way to, in one location, provide some feedback about all my data.
I would imagine that if we did this, at a later stage web applications would either certify that they followed this standard -- or not. No skin off my back in either case.
So for the case of the guy running for office, he'd just have one place to go to in order to say no, I really don't want to share that any more. And perhaps provide an explanation of what happened and why he feels the way he does. People would still be free to distribute whatever data they wanted, but a mechanism is provided to centralize new information related to me. Not the data, but a control block -- which apps can choose to use, ignore, display as an annotation, etc.
If companies are acting in their own interest, then there's no reason for them to do this unless it's a law. I believe there is legislation being drafted regarding how people's information can be handled on social networks.
How would it help though? Sites are still caching old versions of pages. You can annotate that you don't want to share it anymore, but a copy still exists and can be found.
2. Even if it were possible, what about personal responsibility? Why is it a good thing that your past can simply be erased? If you're running for office and it turns out that when you were in college you had lots of crazy coke parties and posted them online, I want to know that and hear you explain it.
I just don't see a strong argument here for why we need to be able to hide what we once thought should be public.