“What!?!” That was the general recent reaction to the news that one of the most popular apps on the market, Snapchat, was offered — and turned down! — Facebook’s more than $3 billion cash buyout offer. Whether Snapchat made the right move to hold out remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: we’re creating and sharing more data than ever before.

Thanks to all the gadgets we have access to, any event can now be chronicled online; photos and documents can be sent from person-to-person (even to the wrong people) on mobile devices in an instant. Since there’s no geographic limit to the access of files, what happens to that photo or document once you’ve sent it out into the Ether?

Part of the appeal of Snapchat is the finite length of time that data exists — offering the sender a semblance of control over…