Does anyone know of any Privacy Acts or laws, national or world wide, that
govern how long a lab can keep your digital files (film scanned or from a
digital camera) ?

If there are, how long can they keep your files on their hard drives?

Example being when you have your film scanned to a CD and the lab needs to
store those files for burning issues. How long should your files be kept at
their lab? Do they have to erase those files after a certain time?

Thank you in advance.
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Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV!

I would think that the lab (or anyone) could keep the digital files for as
long as they want, as long as they do not use/view them or allow anyone to
use/view them without the owner's permission.
From a business standpoint and from a liability standpoint, I would think
that the lab would want to scrub the files from their drives as quickly as
possible, so that they can have more space available on their storage media,
and so that they do not run afoul of any privacy acts or laws, national or
worldwide, that may or may not exist.

(Please go back and reread the disclaimer)

I don't know of any laws that explicitly address this issue; however, this
is basically a question of copyright law. Under United States law, as well
as the law in most other countries, you own the copyright to the photos
you take. (An exception is if you take the photos under contract to
somebody else, such as a photographer for a magazine. In that case, the
contract probably grants the magazine ownership of the copyright, although
this could vary from one contract to another.)

What this means, really, is that the photofinisher has no legal right to
copy your photos without your permission. That's part of the reason for
the legalese notice on film processing envelopes, the other part being to
cover the photofinisher's rear end in case they ruin your film. The point
of all this is that, absent any explicit laws on the matter, you might
want to consult that legalese notice. It might or might not say anything
about how long the photofinisher may retain files. I can't say I've read
these notices very carefully of late, so I don't know if they commonly
include explicit language about this. I do recall getting an e-mail
recently from an online digital photo printer saying that some photos I'd
uploaded to get enlargements were being deleted because they'd sat unused
for too long. (I'd forgotten about them.)