[regoldste]

I don't deny that the easy availability of mass amounts of information about people on the internet has serious, troubling privacy implications, has magnified the importance we ascribe to that information, and has made it more difficult to escape incidents in our past.

But this isn't a freedom with a long-standing history. Far from representing a break with history, this tradition--wherein reputations are sticky and inescapable--is consistent with how human societies lived for thousands of years. Until relatively recently (~100 years ago), the vast majority of people lived in the same town for their entire lives, and there was a collective remembrance of their character. Everybody knew everybody's business, and preserved it through gossip. At least partly out of necessity, our cultures evolved significant traditions of society-wide shaming; stealing an apple could be punished by public shaming in the stocks in the town square. Social acceptance and even livelihood was based on your character, and the punishment for even minor moral failures was severe.

I submit that reputations were only escapable in a meaningful way for maybe the past 75-100 years, when our cultures (at least, industrialized cultures) became increasingly mobile: people left home to pursue education on the other side of the country, to begin careers and new lives in new cities without a trace of their old lives and reputations. This ability to escape your past and reinvent yourself was a brief aberration. The size of our communities exploded in the last 15 years as the internet expanded, and it seems not that different from when we lived in teeny communities and everyone knew our business.

There isn't and never has been a statute of limitations for dumb and embarrassing things. Whether to create one now is a normative question, and regardless of how you come down on that, I just don't think you can justify robust privacy protections--particularly at the expense of transparency--based on supposed historical respect for privacy.

[coldtea]

>But this isn't a freedom with a long-standing history. Far from representing a break with history, this tradition--wherein reputations are sticky and inescapable--is consistent with how human societies lived for thousands of years.

I'm not so sure about that. For thousands of years you could go to another village, city or country and escape your past completely. With technology like Google this is not possible. And people you didn't know didn't have any way to know your face, unlike now with photographs and videos available.

OTOH, yes, in some small village your reputation stayed with you. But:

a) That reputation was built on mostly serious stuff people would remember about you -- perhaps an adultery, that you were a drinker, that your father was a thief etc. They didn't have a permanent record of every BS you said or done, e.g stuff you casually said when you were 14 or some misguided act you did at some obscure place at 23.

b) That reputation was mostly based on heresay. Not hard evidence, like photos, videos, profiles, etc. It was softer, and much less encompassing. And people not directly present when you did something, only heard about it from others, with less important stuff just getting forgotten naturally.

c) People could (and did all the time) change residence to escape an ill reputation.