The right to disappear becomes complicated when other people’s memories contain you.

You can remove your own records and you cannot remove yourself from other people’s memories, photographs, and accounts. Any right to disappear runs directly into other people’s right to remember their own lives, and there is no clean way to separate the two.

If you need distance from a past version of yourself, focus on what you control, your own material and your current presence. For the rest, most of it fades from other people’s attention far faster than it fades from yours. Time does more of this work than any deletion could.