It is a rite of passage for all young adults: explaining away excruciating pictures on Facebook and Twitter from when they were younger.
Now a campaign backed by government, industry and charities is suggesting that this is a burden no teenager should have to bear. Under proposals endorsed by ministers today, children should have the right to delete embarrassing internet pictures of themselves when they reach adulthood.
The “iRights campaign” highlights growing concern at the way in which the internet permanently records errors of judgment, unhappy experiences and immature attitudes.
Government figures have promised to try to persuade technology companies to introduce digital rights so that 18-year-olds can edit or delete all content they created when they were younger. There are no plans to follow California and introduce a law.
This comes after a number of wellpublicised episodes where young people suffered from messages posted during their school days. The most traumatic was the experience of the 17year-old appointed to be the UK’s first youth police and crime commissioner, who resigned within a week because of messages she had sent when she was 14. Paris Brown’s Twitter boasts about her sex life, drug taking and drinking were reproduced by Sunday tabloids.
Kimberley Swann, 16, was fired after describing her office job as boring on Facebook. “It was only a throw-away comment,” she said at the time.
The iRights campaign, which publishes a major report today, insists that young people should be able to clean up their “digital footprint” easily when they reach the age of maturity. The group, backed by Schillings, the law firm, insists that free speech will not be compromised because young people would not have an automatic right to delete reproduced data or content written or produced by others.
The report says: “It is essential that there is an easily accessible route for children and young people to resolve disputes or correct misinformation that does not require recourse to the courts.” The report adds that children should be told how data collected by web firms is used and warns that young people are increasingly worried about digital addiction.
Ministers at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport have taken the rare step of publicly endorsing a crossparty camapign and suggest that they will press technology companies to adopt this approach as standard. Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, has embraced the campaign. She said: “We believe that every child and young person has the right to grow up in a safe environment — that principle applies to the virtual world too.” Earlier this month she set up a commission to establish how to make Scotland adopt these standards.
The iRights report concluded that websites and apps that claim to delete their data have loopholes and warns that online games and social networks are compulsive and dominate children’s time to an unhealthy extent.
Anne Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner for England, will announce today that she is launching a task force, Growing Up Digital, dedicated to improving the online lives of young people by adopting this framework.
She said: “If children of today and tomorrow are to grow up digitally, we need to be sure that the rights to protection and empowerment that they enjoy in their lives are embedded in the new digital world they inhabit.”