1 / 3 Forgetting

"The web means the end of forgetting," wrote the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html" target="_hplink">New York Times</a> earlier this year. "The Internet records everything and forgets nothing." Indeed, increasingly there's a digital copy of everything we do: the emails we send, the phone calls we make, the places we go, the pictures we take, the opinions we write. Google CEO Eric Schmidt even <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/google-ceo-eric-schmidt-s_n_684031" target="_hplink">suggested</a> (in what he later said was a joke) that young people ought to be able to change their names when they hit adulthood in order to escape their "permanent record" on the Internet. We can collect data on everything from our sleep habits to our spending, making it harder than ever for us--and the Internet--to forget what we've said, purchased, or done.