I've been hoping for years that the EU will eventually mandate that a service must be obliged to delete on request - irretrievably, not by merely flagging it as "deleted" - any data held about a given individual.<p>To me, this is a natural part of the concept of privacy. I can have momentary privacy: the assurance that nobody is <i>currently</i> watching through my window, listening to my phone calls, or reading my emails as I send them. But there's no assurance of future privacy if we don't have the right to destroy our old data, wherever it may be held.<p>When people provide an entity with information, they're doing so under the framework provided by current legislation regarding privacy and freedom of information. If these rules are subject to change - through new anti-terror legislation, for example - their information may become accessible in ways that they did not expect when it was originally provided.<p>I don't think it's possible to maintain any real sense of privacy while this remains the case. How can your data be considered private when it can be opened up for inspection at a later date, under a different regime? There's currently no way to participate in a connected economy without giving away your future right to privacy.<p>Edit: and the reason I've been hoping the EU will do this is that, realistically, nobody else will.