I'll make clearer the distinction I'm making between the right to be forgotten and data erasure.
Let's say you've joined a social networking site, and you've created a profile, you have photographs, and you have information on your profile, or let's say it's a dating site and you've created a profile for that. You have that up for a couple of years and you decide you no longer want to be part of that site. You don't want to do business with it—this happens all the time—and you say to the company, “Remove my account and get rid of my personal information, because I'm done.” That's the right to erasure. That's different from the right to be forgotten.
You're not saying that there are newspaper stories about you out there that you don't want anyone reading anymore and you want them de-indexed. You're saying that you've had this relationship with a private sector company that you're terminating and you want the data that you have provided as part of that relationship to be removed. In many circumstances that has been very difficult for people to achieve. That's the right to erasure.
I think that's very important. If we can strengthen the right for people to be able to take those kinds of measures with the private sector organizations that have been collecting and using their personal information, I think that's important.
The other aspect of the right to be forgotten, I have substantial misgivings about.