I recently had ECT for depression. It didn’t work, but it did make me forget about a bunch of random stuff. It’s been such a weird experience. One of the more benign things that keeps coming up is I forget if I watched/finished a show or game and even if I know I did, I can’t remember much about it. I worry about what else I’ve forgotten but I don’t know yet because it hasn’t come up. Like I haven’t been able to work because of my depression, but if at some point in the future I finally get it cured, or at least under control enough to go work, I worry that I’ll just randomly not remember some important things I learned in school or something like that.

So it’s definitely possible to do things that delete memories. I don’t see a reason why with more research we could learn enough about the brain to do this selectively instead of it being a random side effect.

As for whether I’d be worried about such a technology: That has more to do with what our society would look like than the actual tech. If we finally reached a society where we are all truly free, then while I might not use it, I wouldn’t fault others who decided some memory was too painful to keep. If we still lived in a society like we have today, I’d be terrified that the rich and powerful would have yet another tool to fuck with us.