These discussions always suffer from an either/or treatment of privacy and permanence. Your choices aren't "things are remembered forever" and "things are wiped from the face of the earth" they're a spectrum between "easy to find" and "impossible to find."

People also forget that we're having these discussions because there's a natural "censorship" in the decay of information and that rate of decay has been retarded, not eliminated by the advent of the Internet. Something printed in a local newspaper 40 years ago was non-existent for anyone who wasn't willing to schlep down to the library and cruise the microfiche stacks. That presumes that the news was on microfiche. That presumes that your library had the reader. Thing is, even now the information you want may very well be behind a paywall you don't want to enrich. Is that censorship? Is that capitalism?

Gather 'round, kidz, as I share a tale of fake IDs in the era before the Internet. See, there were two approaches: you could steal a laminator and get good with forgery (before Photoshop - this meant finding the right typewriter and making the correct forms to photograph and print, in your basement, in color) or you could get the birth certificate of a dead kid and do it for realsies. If you wanted to do it for realsies, you needed to find obituaries for someone about your age who happened to be dead. This meant reading obituaries. As babies die, and teenagers die, but people in the middle rarely die and you happen to be a teenager, you ended up pretty much reading every newspaper available from 4 or so years before you were born. And it took hours. And you probably discovered that there were only two or three newspapers from your entire state with archives going back that far. So if you found one, and you applied for the death certificate (by pretending to be a geneologist) and then the birth certificate (by pretending to be an insurance adjuster) you could age the birth certificate with tea and sunshine and walk into the DMV and get yourself a legit driver's license. You would be committing felony fraud but hey - what price booze?

Now it's the internet and theoretically you should be able to accomplish the same thing with an Internet search. Ignore for a minute the fact that the paper loopholes exploited in the process above have been closed; it wouldn't matter because those newspapers still aren't much on the web. Sure - Google scanned a whole bunch of 'em in, but the newspapers said "fuck you" and pulled a lot of it down. I had friends that did some extremely stupid shit back in '98 or '99 and while it made the national news, the local reportage on it all has vanished down the memory hole. It's not coming back.

Another perspective? I am Eternal September. My buddy's first Compuserve login was 1991; my first email address was September 1994. Mosaic was what you used at the computer lab and what you used in the dorms was a unix prompt at 2400 baud and Usenet was browsed at the command line. And I browsed the shit out of it. I was all over at least three newsgroups, using a singularly unique ideogram in my signature for upwards of 20 posts a day. And Deja News started archiving it all in '95, and Google bought Deja News in 2000 and there is no search string on google or groups.google.com that will bring up a single thing I said.

I'll bet it's in there. I'll bet Google could serve it up instantaneously. I'll even wager that somebody clever here, probably bfv, can demonstrate exactly how to find myself. But a reporter won't. A prospective girlfriend won't. An employer won't. It exists beyond a reasonable doubt but it is effectively gone.

Since the dawn of time, we have argued about information retention. Branding is all about making society forget that you once committed a crime. That's what The Scarlet Letter was about. What's changed is the level of forgetting, and I don't think we're any more likely to settle on one answer today than we were back when records were committed to cuneiform.