>I have a fear that in the future only governments and large companies in bed with governments will have access to this data and use it in unethical ways.

I'd look back to the Memex for the solution to that problem, it stored everything locally, thus links couldn't be broken. Output included all the linked items. It's possible to build a system that stores everything you've seen on the web locally, to prevent things from disappearing.

I think local storage is highly undervalued, and the pendulum will shift back.