California Law Allows Minors to Erase Embarrassing Posts Online

Clean your Social Presence

A new law in California has recently been passed that lets minors delete past indiscretions on their online social networks. This lets young people have the opportunity to ‘wipe the slate clean’ and create a fresh start - removing the embarrassing pictures or comments they may have posted when they were younger and may now regret. With the growing invasion of companies and colleges into the private lives of potential employees and students, this allows minors to remove posts they might not be proud of before applying to schools and jobs giving them a fresh start. Will this new development in California catch on elsewhere allowing young people to create a new start with their online social presence?

Source: entrepreneur.com

Alongside the development which allows minors to erase their embarrassing posts, the law also builds on existing state and federal legislation that requires Website operators to publicly display a privacy policy, and to notify minors who are using the service that information is being collected about them. The legislation’s second key element other than the ‘eraser button’, is that it stops Internet companies from marketing products to minors that are otherwise prohibited to be offered and sold to minors outside the Internet, for instance the tobacco and alcohol. This implies the protective nature of the law and that the principal reason for its introduction is to guard against what may potentially go wrong when young people have unlimited access to the internet.

The new law, which will only come into effect in California on and after January 1, 2015, “requires the operator of an Internet Web site, online service, online application, or mobile application to permit a minor, who is a registered user of the operator’s Internet Web site, online service, online application, or mobile application, to remove, or to request and obtain removal of, content or information posted on the operator’s Internet Web site, service, or application by the minor.” However, many companies already offer the ability for their users to take control over what content they wish to remain online. For instance, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all provide their users the option to delete content which they do not want others to be able to access anymore, but not all digital platforms do this. This law encourages all social media networks and companies to incorporate privacy settings into their design fully, and provide the option to delete posts.

Source: consumers.ofcom.org.uk

What will this lead to for the behaviour of minors? Will the ability to delete past indiscretions from your online history lead people to be less worried about behaviour which may be viewed as embarrassing in the future, knowing that they can just hit the delete button when it gets posted online? Although this legislation gives young people the opportunity to control their digital personas, it also allows them to hide behaviours which they might not want others to see and therefore they might be more likely to post things of an embarrassing or potentially offensive nature as they will be aware that they can just delete them in the future, when the time comes to apply to college or to jobs. Surely it would be better to get minors to avoid putting this content up in the first place instead of providing an easy option out when they realise the wrongs of their ways? It appears that this could have the wrong effect upon the actions of teenagers, possibly encouraging them to post things they otherwise might not have because they now know it can be deleted at a click of a button.

However, what a lot of young people may not realise is that it is not always possible to delete online content completely. Therefore this eraser button cannot completely be classed as a get out of jail free card for youths. Once something has been transmitted to a third party, the original Internet network, such as Facebook, would have no obligation to try and get that third party site to take down the content. Therefore, if an embarrassing photo was to spread virally, it would be almost impossible to erase history of the post. Furthermore, Internet archives automatically create copies of almost every piece of information on the web.

An example of the way deleted posts may not actually be gone completely is the website ‘Politwoops – deleted tweets from politicians’ in the US – which demonstrates how even the information which you think you have managed to delete may have been accessed by a third party and is therefore no longer in your own control. The site introduces itself by stating: ‘Sure we all tweet things we don’t mean to share, but now politicians have no way to hide them. Discover tweets that your politicians shared and then deleted’. Although the majority are deleted due to small spelling errors, or a change of opinion on what they’ve posted, others can reveal potentially career threatening comments, showing that once something is posted online it is never truly possible to remove the evidence of it completely.

What do you think?
Will the law introduced in California be taken up by any other states in the US or other countries in the world? Should minors be given the opportunity to wipe the slate clean on their social networks?

Rowena Cormack  

Contact us on Twitter, on Facebook, or leave your comments below.