I recently closed my Coinbase.com account permanently. Or tried to. I demanded they erase all record of my data they have on their servers (except for transactions, duh, because they are on the blockchain), and they told me they planned on keeping my data for FIVE YEARS. I told them they'd be hearing from my lawyer. (Not sure if I actually want to go down that legal road yet, but I do know I'll never be talking to, or using Coinbase again.)
Not to defend Coinbase or anything, but they must be required by law to keep all their business records for five years, if only for tax auditing purposes.
It sounds like you kind of are defending Coinbase. Irrespective of what the business records requirements are of them, if a customer is done with them and wants the data off of their servers, I will continue to argue that they should remove it. I'm not interested in stale standards or companies that don't respect users. I'm going a different path.
I suggest everyone reading this close their Coinbase and BitPay accounts. For starters.
edit: I also want to point out / remind readers of the following:
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The root of the issue is choice.
If you believe that coercion and violence should be used to accomplish the ends you desire, then you abandon choice and you favor modern regulation and the rule of law - backed, of course, by coercion and violence.
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It is also notable that in most countries, the 'shadow economy' is the real economy, clocking in at over 80 percent of all monetary flow, and that percentage is growing. Indeed, even before the development of the internet, the 'shadow economy' (really what should be called the real economy) was collectively larger than all aspects of regulated transactions combined. This is telling and should provide for the casual observer a general foreshadowing of a world in which regulated economic activity (and notions of regulated or classical identity) drop from the approximate 20 percent figure to something in the four to five percent range. It is likely that you will see societies that are a direct reflection of this aforementioned reality evolve in less than 20 years' time.
In any event, mechanisms of social organization, whether they are a result of physical assemblages and direct interactions of persons without much use of technology, or social organizations that emanate more from the usage of technology, will not ultimately support those who believe that coercion, violence, jail, and war should be used to back the rule sets that they believe are necessary. You may ask why not, since after all violence will always be present and there will always be coercive agents, and the reason is because as time goes on, individuals and associations will increasingly be empowered by a broader range of choices - and they will be able to make them independent of the corporation-states that came to prominence 226 years ago.
Thus at the root of this is choice, and technology which empowers people to make choices that can be concealed from coercive and violent actors.
You have a choice. Those who insist on clinging to the past will have progressively fewer choices to make as time goes on, and those who cling to the past and demand that others comply with their will (and threaten us with violence or jail if we do not) will find themselves in the wastebin of history. You can prepare by understanding that the choices you make today will be part and parcel of what we today, call "the future."
