Google chief Eric Schmidt has painted a frightening portent of a world sleepwalking toward technological saturation in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

The tech savvy CEO prophesies that every young person will one day be entitled to change their name upon reaching adulthood in order to disown salacious goings on memorialised within friend’s social networking sites.

Schmidt adds: “We really have to think about these things as a society, I'm not even talking about the really terrible stuff such as terrorism and access to evil things."

The moral quagmire presented by having the odd moment of madness or ill advised jape preserved for eternity in digital aspic, where once it could have been swept under the carpet, is only now becoming apparent.

As one hapless Israeli soldier recently found to her cost the out of control nature of internet dissemination and questionable personal antics make for an explosive mix, one that we all might come to have first hand experience of in the years to come.