content: Exactly this.  Even sites that give you the illusion of control by allowing you to "delete" things are really just that, an illusion.  All you are doing is severing YOUR link to that information.  If you think it's not being retained on a server somewhere, you're almost certainly wrong.    A good example is the new Google Activity page they just launched.  It has every form of Google activity you can think of, from searches, to voice texts, to pretty much anything that passes through their servers, going back as long as you've had the account.  They have searches and voice texts from me from like the last 5 years.  Sure, I can "delete" everything there, but I'm realistic enough to know that it won't really be gone, and even if it was, it's already been sold and copied somewhere else.  The best thing you can do is give them as little information as possible to limit the profile they can build on you, that is assuming you care. But with the push away from physical currency and physical stores and the ever-increasing digital nature of our lives, that's becoming more impossible every day. It'll all probably boil over at some point, but I can't say when or how.