Even with the most non-intrusive and fair government imaginable, if lots of information about your life is easily available online, it means that a single stupid mistake in life that would earlier have only mild consequences can ruin your reputation forever and render you permanently unemployable and shunned socially.

I've heard this opinion expressed frequently, but it always seems to kind of contradict itself. If there's lots of information available about everyone, and all kinds of stupid mistakes will easily become permanently recorded...

...then wouldn't that lead to just about everyone's reputation being ruined in the eyes of everyone? But that doesn't make any sense - if almost everyone's going to have some stupid mistakes of theirs caught permanently on file, then all that will happen is that you'll find out you're not the only one who has made stupid mistakes. Big deal.

In fact, this to me seems potentially preferrable than our current society. Right now, people's past mistakes get lost in the past. As a result, we construct an unrealistic image where most people seem far more perfect than they actually are. Some past mistake coming out might ruin someone's reputation, and people who have made perfectly normal and reasonable mistakes will feel a lot more guilty about it than would be warranted. If the mistakes everyone had made were available, then we wouldn't have these unrealistic unconscious conceptions of how perfect people must be. Society might be far healthier as a result.