When the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) a year ago, one of the most revolutionary aspects of the regulation was the “right to be forgotten”—an often-hyped and debated right, sometimes perceived as empowering individuals to request the erasure of their information on the internet, most commonly from search engines or social networks.

WIRED OPINION ABOUT Darren Shou is vice president of research at Symantec.

Since then, the issue of digital privacy has rarely been far from the spotlight. There is widespread debate in governments, boardrooms, and the media on how data is collected, stored, and used, and what ownership the public should have over their own information. But as we continue to grapple with this crucial issue, we’ve largely failed to address one of the most important aspects—how do we control our data once it’s been fed into the artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning algorithms that are becoming omnipresent in our lives?

Virtually every modern enterprise is in some way or another collecting data on its customers or users, and that data is stored, sold, brokered, analyzed, and used to train AI systems. For instance, this is how recommendation engines work—the next video we should watch online, the next purchase, and so on, are all driven by this process.

At present, when data is sucked into this complex machinery, there’s no efficient way to reclaim it and its influence on the resulting output. When we think about exerting the right to be forgotten, we recognize that reclaiming specific data from a vast number of private businesses and data brokers offers its own unique challenge. However, we need to realize that even if we can succeed there, we’ll still be left with a difficult question—how do we teach a machine to “forget” something?

This question is even more impactful for children and adolescents coming of age in this world—the “AI Generation.” They have gone through the largest “beta test” of all time, and it’s one that did not consider the fact that children make mistakes, they make choices, and they are given space by society to collectively learn from them and evolve. Algorithms may not offer this leniency, meaning that data collected on a youthful transgression may be given the same weight (and remembered the same) as any other data—potentially resulting in the reinforcement of bad behavior, or limited opportunities down the line as this data becomes more embedded into our lives.

For instance, today a college admissions counselor may be able to stumble upon incriminating photos of an applicant on a social media platform—in the future, they may be able to hear recordings of that applicant as a 12-year-old taken by a voice assistant in the child’s home.

The AI Generation needs a right to be forgiven.

How Did We Get Here?

Historically, we have worked hard to create protections for children—whether that’s laws about advertising, the expunging of juvenile criminal records, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or other initiatives. All of these align with a common belief in our society that there’s a dividing line between adulthood and childhood, and that standards and accountability need to be separate and more forgiving for youth.

Children coming of age today are not always enjoying that privilege. This prolific data collection and the infusion of AI into their daily lives has happened with minimal oversight, and seemingly little serious thought has been given to what the consequences could be. Society engaged in far more rigorous debate over advancements that would seem trivial today—the introduction of car radios, for example, drew much more concern from the United States government. The moral panics of the mid 20th century seem quaint in comparison to today’s digital free-for-all.

The lack of debate on what data collection and analysis will mean for kids coming of age in an AI-driven world leaves us to imagine its implications for the future. Mistakes, accidents, teachable moments—this is how children learn in the physical world. But in the digital world, when every click, view, interaction, engagement, and purchase is recorded, collected, shared, and analyzed through the AI behemoth, can algorithms recognize a mistake and understand remorse? Or will bad behavior be compounded by algorithms that are nudging our every action and decision for their own purposes?