If erasing, Google must be sure it is duly authorized to do so, and should keep a public record on the erasers

Sir in principle I agree with John Gapper in that “People do not have the right to erase the web’s memory” May 15. That said, thinking on my own youth, and though I do not remember all my doings very well, I guess there might have been occasions when I was lucky these were not memorized by a web, and so I guess my grandchildren should have the same right.

What I am more concerned about is the possibility that someone else instructs Google or someone in Google takes it upon himself, to erase without authorization one of my memories causing me to suffer from web Alzheimer. And in this respect, were the erasing to start, then Google needs to make sure the erasing is authorized and keep a public record of all erasing going on preferably with an identification of what was erased, a photo or something else. At least in this case John Gapper could have seen that his developer was hiding something. 

And what if there is a photo of two and one wants it erased and the other dearly wants to hang on to the memory?

Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers

Sir we fully understand the plea of Eric Schmidt in “Global privacy standards are needed” September 19, since for a company like Google it must be nightmarish to manage the 50 different approaches to privacy of each state in the US.

Having said that it is not without some fear that we citizens would entrust a global agency with the development of any global privacy standards, and that is not simply because we could be scared that these regulations could turn out to be too relaxed but also because, just as well, they could turn too rigid for our own good. We are yet in the infancy of a global information revolution where access breeds its own needs and so perhaps, before letting bureaucrats lose, it would be nice see the industry come up and agree with some proposals of their own, just to see how they look.

Eric Schmidt himself clearly points to the benefits of self regulation The problems with regulations is that they normally entail choosing a path from where it is later hard to backtrack and as an example let us just look at how the banking regulators empowered the credit rating agencies and now do not really know what to do with them.

Clearly Eric Schmidt has his own commercial needs for regulations and we citizens have ours, and they might not be the same, but perhaps both of us could benefit from thinking about that phrase from a Garth Brooks song that goes ”Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers”

PS. We might need a Global Web Constitution