Here's three great articles from last week. They are all worth reading in full, but I've pulled out some key quotes for your convenience here.

"In nation of exhibitionists, there's still a demand for privacy", Michael Gerson, Washington Post, 15 Jan 2010

Who actually owns an e-mail, text message or Facebook update? The person who composes it? The owner of the instrument that stores or communicates it? When supervisors view messages posted from public or company property, are they reading the equivalent of a T-shirt or a diary? Is there really a constitutional right to "sext" your mistress from your employer's cellphone?

"Privacy is neither dead not dying", Professor Andy Miah, 15 Jan 2010

Maintaining digital privacy is about a) ensuring that what we put online goes only so far as we would like and b) being allowed to keep offline those aspects of our lives that we would prefer not to share.

"F.T.C.: Has Internet Gone Beyond Privacy Policies?", Stephanie Clifford, The New York Times, 11 Jan 2010

Advise-and-consent “depended on the fiction that people were meaningfully giving consent,” Mr. Vladeck said. “The literature is clear” that few people read privacy policies, he said.

While first-party uses of data were generally within consumers’ reasonable expectations, he said, more questions arose around data brokers, data aggregators, social networks, cloud computing and mobile marketing.

...He said the commission was still looking into the issue, but it hoped to have an answer by June or July, when it plans to publish a report on the subject. Mr. Leibowitz gave a hint as to what might be included: “I have a sense, and it’s still amorphous, that we might head toward opt-in,” Mr. Leibowitz said.

What's most striking is the almost universal emphasis on the data / content the subject herself is responsible for. It's what she puts up / posts / shares / publishes / feeds about herself, and there's almost no debate about what is published about her by third parties. The debate has not yet moved on to her rights to have content that features her to be deleted, or forgotten.

Professor Andy Miah comes closest in the extract above, but it may well be the overwhelming apparent impossibility to architect a Forget Web that keeps it from being discussed. Here are a couple of responses I've received via Twitter that convey similar sentiment.

From @markpinsent: @Sheldrake Need to have a proper read. Like the idea. but not sure how it gets realised? Who decides what to forget and what not to?

From @gabbicahane: The intention is spot on, hard to police though. Collaboration is crucial. #forgetweb