This is actually what has been bothering me for a while now. In the past where search engines (well at least the big one) weren't that thorough, you didn't mind if something stayed on the Internet, since it wasn't easily accessible.
But it's a major difference if it's indexed/searchable or downloadable.
This is why, I think we need to make ICT (Information Communication Technology) a mandatory subject in our schools.
Teach kids about the internet. Many people are still under the assumption just deleting something would make it disappear for ever.
Maybe a lot of people from our generation are doomed to sharing too many things online, but we can at least save the next generation from themselves.
You make a mistake 10 years ago, may be a few close friends in your town know about you. Now you make a mistake, the whole world has access to that information.
Government regulations, bans are not going to do anything to stop the spread of information, we need to educate people to protect themselves from their own selves.
Judging by how much of a hash lots of schools are doing with literacy and numeracy (and we've been teaching these things for ages), I don't have high hopes for ICT.
Given their lax security and general cluelessness of the people in charge, I'm quite sure it will leak at some point, at least partially, perhaps to corporations, perhaps to the public, just as internal NSA docs have leaked. It's very hard to keep things like that airtight forever - all it takes is one slip up and all the info stored could be accessible at some point in the future. It's already indexed and searchable, just not by you.
The important point here is that looking at present day tech (as in your comment on search engine prowess) is not the way to look at it - one day all this information will be accessible to much more intelligent future algorithms, able to link it together in myriad ways and form an almost perfect picture of your life in retrospect. The data is there, and will be stored forever.
Snowden used "a memory stick and other removable media, including a CD-ROM that he labeled as a Lady Gaga music CD" [1], so this kind of limiting wouldn't work. But he still did loads of internal network data queries, that's what I'm talking about.
This is actually what has been bothering me for a while now. In the past where search engines (well at least the big one) weren't that thorough, you didn't mind if something stayed on the Internet, since it wasn't easily accessible.
But it's a major difference if it's indexed/searchable or downloadable.