A friend once had a rather unflattering picture of himself posted on Facebook. It was snapped by his friend during a night of revelry and depicted him face red, eyes glazed, partying like an animal.
The incident did not make him lose his job. But it did remind him that there was no quicker way for someone to spread information about him to his extended network of a few hundred friends, co-workers and acquaintances.
So he decided to wrest control of his dented reputation - he was dancing like John Travolta circa 1977 - and deleted his Facebook account.
It was an extreme move but possibly quite enlightening, given the nature of the Internet. It forgets nothing.
In fact, in the global village of today, the Internet has become town crier, spreading heat-of-the-moment tweets, whiny status updates and inane blog entries. Through search engines and social networks, the Internet has taken to alerting people about what others do.
Facebook, the largest social networking site, signed up its 500 millionth user last week. That number represents 22 per cent of all Internet users and they share some 25 billion pieces of content - from pictures to videos and status updates - each month.
The results of this sharing have sometimes been detrimental.
A Singaporean man in his late 20s was fired last year after pictures of him attending a concert during sick leave were posted on Facebook by his friends.
Earlier this month, the CNN editor for Middle Eastern affairs lost her job after she tweeted about her respect for Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah who had died.
Examples of people caught in similar situations are being created daily, and because the Internet never forgets, the damage can extend into the future.
A recent survey commissioned by Microsoft found that 70 per cent of hiring managers and recruiters in the United States have rejected candidates based on the information they have found online about them.
To mitigate the effects of this, legal academics have proposed tweaks to privacy laws. For example, prohibiting employers from searching certain databases before hiring.
Yet, this limits only the effect of the fall-out and does not actually prevent damaging information from going online.
On the technology end, researchers have also been coming up with new solutions that will force the Internet to forget.
For example, an open source application called Vanish has been developed by University of Washington researchers to automatically destroy information entered into websites after some time has passed.
Even then, any information copied and reposted before it is destroyed can live on.
That does not mean, though, that people should live as digital hermits.
While waiting for laws and technology to catch up, maybe people will learn to have more empathy for those who have made mistakes. Even if the Internet never learns to forget, society could collectively learn to forgive. After all, you never know when the scrutiny will turn on you.
