To borrow an image from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, trying to remove information from the internet is like trying to unstir the jam from semolina. And that’s the second thing. Not just that information can’t be removed but that, corporate and personal alike, it’s being gathered as never before - and to gather information is so close to distributing it as to make no difference.  This is the age of the leaky database. The only defence against intrusion, in the long run, will be to be sufficiently uninteresting that nobody will bother to find out what there is to know about you.  

Sam Leith