>Unfortunately, when you post ANYTHING online... one must assume it's like a tattoo... that is to say permanent. Not saying it's right or wrong (because believe me I have my own privacy/trust issues), just saying it is reality.

It isn't reality. Reality is that it's simply data on a server. Data on a server isn't permanent, the web was never designed or intended to provide an immutable record of anything.

Data is only saved when it has value, and only as long as that value exceeds the cost of maintaining continuous copies, and sometimes (as recently nearly happened with Google code) people simply become careless and the one and only copy of something vanishes without a trace. Many, many things have vanished from the internet without a trace.