Removing your History

I've been on the Internet a very long time (since pre-web) and if you google me you'll find some interesting things. But I haven't posted or published very much in the past 15 years.

Here's an interesting challenge - in about 10 years, there will be millions of ex-Facebook, MySpace and Blog users who will want their comments on their boyfriends/girlfriends, their parties and/or their drama stories removed.

How are we going to do this in the future - surely with the amount of user generated content coming our way we need a system for content removal.

There are a few problems to address in this space:

1. Finding all your content (your linked in profile, your my space web site, your facebook profile, etc.)
2. Finding all someone else's content about you (someone else's posts about you, your postings on other people's web sites, etc.)
3. Removing the content in by request (e.g. you shutting down your facebook account)
4. Removing the content systematically (e.g. delete from all sources this picture)
4. Expiring content in a reasonable time frame (e.g. only allow this to remain online for 30 days)

Individuals now have the same problem as copyright holders - trying to manage all the publishers, syndicators and borrowers of their content is next to impossible.

So what's the solution...stay tuned for more ideas.