I was scrolling through the Markkula Center for AppliedEthics’ (Santa Clara, CA) website early this afternoon, and I stumbled upon an
intriguing video by Reputation.com co-founder Owen Tripp titled, “The Right to be Forgotten”. This is a topic I think about every day, but I never thought of
as an ethical issue. My generation has grown up in the age of social media,
where documenting anything out of the ordinary is worth posting on Facebook,
Twitter, or Instagram. Almost everything we do is being memorialized. For those
trying to enter the workforce, this usually isn’t a good thing.
I think of college students today putting up photos from
weekends of partying with that look in their eye that says, “I hope my eyes are
open right now” and I wonder if that should haunt them 10+ years from now. Or
the University of Iowa girl who attempted to storm the field of the Iowa-Northern
Illinois football game, and blew a .341 BAC and then tweeted #yolo…will that
always be considered when she’s applying for jobs? And should it matter?
My opinion: if you put it on the web, expect repercussions,
good or bad. But as Owen Tripp asks, do we need an advanced system of
regulation to determine what history can be revealed and what cannot? What
would that even look like? If it’s a civil liberty for Americans to permanently
delete past documentation as he says, does that go against the brilliance of
the internet as a seemingly infinite database?
What do you think?
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