Recently, on a crowded bus, I saw a woman struggling with a toddler in full tantrum mode. The little child was sobbing and screaming “What is my password? What is my password” over and over again. The child’s mother could do nothing but shush her. Did this child have a password? Did the mother know it? We all hoped so. Anything to stop the meltdown.

UK citizens to get more rights over personal data under new laws Read more

Everyone has seen a child who can only just walk, and hardly use a spoon, master an iPad. It all comes so naturally, say the proud and somewhat stunned parents. One consequence of an increasing ease with technology over the past decade or so is that we now have young adults who’ve only ever known a world in which personal information and images are circulated online. A world in which an online presence is deemed a necessity. The violation of one’s own privacy has been part of the deal for this “exposure” – despite the fact that increasing numbers are learning the hard way that once something is online, it never really goes away.

The data protection bill now seeks to give people the right to force the huge companies who dominate the internet to delete personal data. During the election campaign Theresa May mentioned plans to give people the right to request deletion of social media posts, and it looks like it’s now happening. Labour’s Tom Watson has stated he supports the changes proposed by Matt Hancock, the minister of state for digital and culture. “Labour’s manifesto committed to allowing young people to remove content shared on the internet before they turned 18,” he says.

All those embarrassing Facebook/Instas of drunken antics and incessant posing with blunts, bongs and gangsta signs. Do you really want future employers looking at this? Or anyone?

This is iGen – the Generation of Too Much Information – who, we are warned, are often lonely and depressed, and that can be exacerbated by living online. To counter this, we could look at the recent reduction in rates of drinking, smoking and teen pregnancy and say: it’s not so bad. One thing’s for certain – we do not yet know all the consequences of growing up in a world in which so much personal data has been circulated. In this culture of self-surveillance, privacy has been forfeited and these changes in the law are an attempt to claw some of it back.

It is a recognition that we all make mistakes, especially when young – and that a stupid picture should not be an indelible stain. A gesture, perhaps more hopeful than workable, towards huge companies such as Facebook and Google. An attempt to answer the question: who owns personal data, them or us? It can be difficult to get a Facebook page taken down even when someone has died. Facebook instead offers to “memorialise” it.

The copyrighting of one’s own shallow existence. How very quaint. I like it.

Some of this is about education and explaining that what’s posted online tends to stay online. No wonder Snapchat, with its promise of impermanence (though screenshotting gets round instant deletion), has been such a hit with young people. But we need to go further.

While social media is all about making a mark, about saying “This is me”, the right to be forgotten is about handing over a different kind of power. It is the assertion of ownership of one’s own identity by refusing to give ownership to the platforms that published the posts.

The copyrighting of one’s own shallow existence. How very quaint. I like it. There is a freedom in being able to delete the digital past. Or indeed in growing up without one. The right to be forgotten is actually about the right to have a past that is not always perfect: a life, in other words.

• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist