Just because you've forgotten about a company doesn't mean that a company has forgotten about you—or your data.

While emerging laws such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 may be granting consumers more control over how their personal information is collected and used by businesses, those powers aren't automatically triggered by the termination of a subscription or service agreement.

According to Kirk Nahra, a partner specializing in privacy and information security litigation and counseling at Wiley Rein, privacy laws and the lifecycle of commercial relationships continue to run on parallel tracks.