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Good luck deleting data from my 5th backup drives that I didn't tell you about. It's not hard because destroying a hard drive is hard, it's hard because you need to find not one, but all of the drives that are likely replicated and distributed around the globe already if you ever intended to do business with that data.

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It's not a technical problem to solve, it's a legal one. If there is a crushing penalty if data that was supposed to be deleted shows up one day, companies will find a way to delete it.

One issue I foresee is that you can't legislate bugs away.

A bug is just a mistake, and the legal system already deals with mistakes in a variety of ways.

Umm you can. You can force companies to pass their code through an examination (even by a third party) and define a procedure of ensuring strict data hygiene. If they cannot pass each year, they will be subject to fines.

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