That's pretty much what Eric Schmidt talks about in The New Digital Age. He says that the technical requirements for building reliable systems at scale makes in

That's pretty much what Eric Schmidt talks about in The New Digital Age. He says that the technical requirements for building reliable systems at scale makes information tricky to impossible to delete. He also says the same thing you said, which is that the implication of data being permanent is that, even if privacy is respected by these companies today, future generations might hold the complete opposite values and could change the laws. What's to stop the cloud natives from making all your emails and search history public after you die? Is it really so difficult to believe, if we consider how common it is for the private letters of important historical figures to be published?