Sharing Too Much Data

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that public figures of the future will have to contend with their own Facebook party photos. Should we expect name changes en masse as a solution? “Thanks to the global popularity of social networking—an estimated 600 million people have personal online profiles—friends, prospective employers and enemies alike are able to access photographs, videos and blogs that we may have long forgotten with a few simple clicks of a mouse. Recently one columnist in The New York Times went so far as to describe our current world as an age defined by ‘the impossibility of erasing your posted past and moving on’. Many websites yesterday picked up on the apparent disconnect between Mr Schmidt’s comments and his company’s ethos.”