In other words, I ought to be able to tell Facebook to only keep a one month history on me and truly delete everything else, including from backups. If
I want a 100% erase of everything, I should be able to get that too. It should be a simple single button operation with suitable confirmation.
Perhaps I want all my pictures erased. It should be easy.
How about all of my facial recognition data for myself and my children? That too.
In other words, these services should not be allowed to store data on you that you don't want them to have. We should not toss out privacy just to protect someone's business model.
I had an interesting experience with Turo.com. It's a P2P car rental service. I decided I wanted to try it. To sign-up I had to give up what I would call deep personal info: Name, address, date of birth, credit card, driver's license and maybe a few more things (don't remember). I ended-up not using it even once. It just didn't fit my needs.
I contacted the company with a request to cancel my account and delete all of my personal information from their database. They refused. Well, they wanted to have the account go dormant at first. I pressed and they agreed to cancel the account. No data deletion though. I said: What possibly justification do you have to keep such sensitive information in your database and backups when I am not a customer and don't want to use your service? Well, long story short, they agreed to delete the data. My guess is they lied to me. Without a court order I have no way to verify that my data isn't sitting in multiple backups ready to be hacked or used by another company if they sell the company or go bankrupt and the database is sold as an asset.
The consequences of having your data stored in databases forever could come years, decades later, when an event lands your data in the hands of someone with nefarious intent or someone who might accidentally and without intention cause you and others harm.
This is just one example.
We really need a law that says our data is ours and we get to decide who can keep it, what they can keep, for how long and under what conditions. This isn't hard and it is common sense. Put a different way: Just because a 15 year old in a garage decides to launch an internet business it doesn't mean that 15 year old is entitled to own our data and do with it as he or she pleases.