Eric Schmidt’s words, not mine.

In surprising comments made during a conference at Manhattan’s New York university yesterday, the Google Chairman touched upon a sticky subject that’s likely to resonate with most internet users today.

No two ways about it, the world is much better off with now it has the internet. The internet has made the world a much smaller space, bringing people closer together, helping us to communicate, spreading knowledge and ideas, and creating massive new industries that employ millions all over the world. But with that connectivity comes an awful lot of responsibility.

As reported by Fast Company, Schmidt gave the example of a juvenile who commits a crime in his teenage years. As a minor, that criminal record is wiped clean when he becomes an adult, but evidence of his past can still be found online, and could well damage his future prospects.

Schmidt claims that while the internet is a uniquely powerful tool, if we’re not careful it could end up encroaching on the “sense of fairness” that exists in the United States.

We’ve seen evidence of this already. In the UK, there was the case of Paris Brown, who was offered the role of Britain’s first youth police and crime commissioner, a position that entails providing a young person’s perspective towards modern policing. Unfortunately, just weeks after her name was put forward for the job, a scandal erupted over tweets she had sent while aged 14, which were considered by some people to be “homophobic, violent and racist”. Brown was never prosecuted for the inflammatory tweets, but she ended up turning down the police position, and it’s likely that the media scandal is going to harm her future career prospects for years to come.

The big problem with the internet today is that everyone leaves a digital footprint of some sort, and if we make mistakes in our youth its nigh on impossible to delete these from the web.

“I propose that by the age of 18, you should, just as a policy, change your name. Then you can say “it wasn’t really me; I didn’t do that!””, insisted Schmidt at the conference.

Schmidt’s comments may have been somewhat spontaneous, but nevertheless they hold true for many of the privacy issue that internet users need to keep in mind in this day and age.

“This lack of a delete button on the Internet is in fact a significant issue,” Schmidt continued.

“There are times when erasure [of data] is the right thing…and there are times when it is inappropriate. How do we decide? We have to have that debate now.”

Few will argue that Schmidt is right about that, but what with a new generation of connected devices like Google Glass, Smart Watches and the Internet of Things just around the corner, and the new level of dependence on the web that they’ll bring, one can’t help but wonder if it’s already too late.