Gov. Jerry Brown of California recently signed a law that allows residents to erase online indiscretions posted while they were teenagers.
But one can only imagine that these digital breadcrumbs — meaningless as personal debris, but more damning when they suddenly draw public attention — became a source of some anxiety for them, particularly as their computer equipment was seized and the ability to delete accounts, remove images and otherwise erase online legacies was cut off.
I have often mused that being "off the grid" and therefore not beholden to technology could become the new status symbol, but in the meantime, some new offerings strive to hide and even erase online activities.
On social media, phrases like "anti-sexual harassment" have been erased, and online petitions are intermittently deleted.
Fewer netizens want to publicly engage with their views, and, as a result, they're being erased from online discussions.
Straight marriage defenders don't want to speak up, liberal voices take their place in the conversation vacuum and, as a result, the opposition to gay marriage is being erased from online discussions.
Privacy guardians in Europe want the ability to erase some online material, known as "the right to be forgotten," but archivists and historians object.
With this evidential vacuum, only two conclusions could be reached: Your Old Droog was Nas, or he was some kid from Coney Island who had purposefully erased his entire online backlog and hid from the rap media.
North Korea's state media have erased almost their entire online archives since the execution of Kim Jong-un's uncle Jang Song-thaek.
The Tate Gallery in London chronicles works by 40 artists that were destroyed, discarded, rejected, erased or stolen in an online exhibition called "The Gallery of Lost Art".
