The Permanent Record
Before applying to university this year, I was advised to clean up my social media. Delete the old posts, lock the accounts, check what turns up under my name. Not much, as it happens. It was a strange exercise: editing a fifteen-year-old version of myself so strangers would judge who I am now. I was raised to be careful online, warned early that everything is permanent. Only later did it strike me that not everyone is taught to be so careful.
Mine is the first generation to grow up with a complete, searchable record of itself. Every post and photo from fifteen is still there, waiting for universities, employers and whatever algorithm decides what shows up. Older generations were allowed to forget and to be forgotten. So I wondered what it means that mine might not be.
Governments have noticed and promised a right to erase your past. But it delivers less than it promises. California's Online Eraser law allows under-18s to delete only their own posts. Not what others posted about them and only the original copy, so shares and screenshots survive. Legal scholars call it the illusion of control, and the question of whether children have any real right to be forgotten remained unsettled in 2025.
In any case, the record is not only what we choose to post. Institutions build it too. England's new Education Record app, arriving in 2026, gives students lifelong access to their results and employers a verifiable history. In Singapore, our data protection law binds companies but not the government, and it is the government that holds the exam and school records that follow you for life. A child's data is logged long before they understand what consent means. Most of the record that will follow us, we had no hand in.
Much of this is defensible. Verifiable records cut fraud and stronger data rules exist for real reasons. A permanent trail can even protect the powerless, by keeping a record no one can quietly erase. What unsettles me is the sum of it. Together, they remove something older generations never had to think about: the freedom to grow up and leave your younger self behind.
And that freedom has a price. This is where my near-empty search result comes back. Escaping your past is becoming something you can afford, or cannot. People with money pay to bury an old mistake; those without stay exposed. Whether you are judged by who you are now, or by who you were at fifteen, comes down to money.
Maybe this is the price of a connected life. But when a society keeps a complete record of its children, the greater cost is what they lose by having no option to forget. I keep thinking about how little my name turned up, and how little I did to earn it.
