This has been a really hot button item for the last couple of years with regards to Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter and other web 2.0 technologies. Email is kind of a different animal because it isn't as proprietary as the others and there is a much greater expectation of privacy associated with email. The big providers that Alex mentioned all have clear policies regarding inactivity and deletion of content (4 months for Yahoo, 9 months for Gmail, 270 days for Hotmail); whether or not you believe they completely delete it or not is up to you, but that is the kind of thing, if discovered, would really hurt a brand name. And the big problem for most of these web 2.0 darlings is figuring out how to monetize all this information.

A year ago this month there was a big uproar over Facebook changing its TOS to basically state they could do whatever they wanted with your information even if you chose to delete your page. Privacy groups got ahold of the changes and Facebook eventually reverted back to the old TOS that put a clause back in saying that deletion implied the license would automatically expire, protecting your data from future use. Here's a WSJ article discussing the situation http://bit.ly/b5MWjw and one of the first (if not the first) blog postings that started the Facebook TOS firestorm http://bit.ly/bfE0VW

Ultimately it boils down to the business model and privacy expectations of the service being provided. Facebook and Twitter have relatively low expectations of privacy and do not have particularly established or lucrative business models so they will continue to push the privacy envelope in attempts to make this mountain of data they are sitting on a mountain of cash. Right now the web 2.0 technologies offer the path of least resistance and if they are eventually overcome, we might see some push into the privacy expectations of email as well.

My own opinion completely!

Matt
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Twitter: mwgrantRM

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