Chances are, that's not the case.
The only notable exception is ad business because "users" are not customers and do not enter any transactions.
The legal basis is actually quite broad. For example, most companies need to keep records for accounting purposes for several years which would count as a lawful basis. Another example would be keeping client data in case you need to protect yourself against potential future litigation e.g. a gym may need to protect themselves against personal injury claims (otherwise you could injure yourself, ask them to delete the records and then sue them).
A legal requirement is "you shall retain these data for N years or face prison time" not "this might be helpful in a lawsuit"
This is covered here[1]
Basically:
* The right to object is not applicable if your processing is based on contract, legal obligation or protection of vital interest
* The right to erasure is not applicable in case of a legal obligation or public interest
[1]https://github.com/LINCnil/GDPR-Developer-Guide/blob/master/...
Yes, you can ask that your avatar image be removed. But they can easily claim that your name, address, bank account number are needed for tax auditing and Know Your Customer purposes.
Also, remember that data subjects have a right to limit the purposes for which their data is used – systems need to be able to cope with that.
This is where a well thought-out and documented approach to personal information makes everything easier, for internal users of that data too. For legacy systems it can be a nightmare because nobody seemed to care, but with a clean sheet, _why wouldn’t you_ address data protection and privacy from the outset?
Easiest way to do this is probably to duplicate data into another table for tax audit purposes, that your "normal" applications have no permission to read. Then you can delete everything your application can access and still keep legal records.
It’s probably healthy to design systems that are build to let people manage their own data though. I think people will slowly start to expect that of you in the future as more and more solutions start to offer it.
In the public sector of Denmark we give people access to all their health data. When I have blood drawn for analysis (not English and I don’t know what it’s called sorry) I can log in and see the results exactly like the doctor sees them. When I’ve been to a doctors consultant and she’s written stuff in my journal I can log in and read it. People are going to want that stuff once they get used to it.