Hopefully it won't muddy the water further.
We actually view it less as a right to be forgotten, as others have said, and more as related to PIPEDA's data accuracy component. What we hear from people who have issues of a “right to be forgotten” type is that it creates a skewed perception of their reputation by highlighting specific things that are not necessarily the definition of their reputation.
We prefer at the outset to even not really think of it. Their solution is not necessarily to make the information disappear but to obscure it, to some degree, so that it's not the first thing that people learn about them, in a way that skews their perception of their reputation.
That being said, reputation is a tricky thing. Many of us have things out there about us that we wouldn't want to define us but which should, for legitimate reasons, be part of our reputation. There's an objective component to it. That's where the struggle, in our view, comes. It's about how we formulate something that addresses what is a challenge for some people.
In relation to the EU right, we think that a Canadian right would probably be narrower in scope, in the sense that it would at the very least apply to a smaller subset of subject matter. It might not apply to every piece of information about me that's outdated, but maybe to the more sensitive types of information, information that is having a demonstrably negative impact—medical conditions, financial information that got out there in a way that wasn't necessarily within my control, or information like that. The scope would be narrower, I think, for a Canadian-formulated right, and we have some judicial decisions that have talked about what a privacy harm is in that context, which are relevant there.
There are also additional problems with respect to how this becomes implemented.
The EU relied on intermediary search engines to carry out the right. Those engines are responsible for removing or delisting. We've seen many problems with this intermediary model in many legal contexts. I've heard that, similar to a recent decision of the Federal Court, Globe24h, the Privacy Commissioner went instead after the host site and said it could keep the information up—so it's not forgotten, it's still there—but that it needed to shield certain things from certain types of search exposure.
Something like that, which looks at the primary site as opposed to the intermediary, might be more appropriate and might get at some of the concerns that arise in this context.
That's as far as we've gotten. I hope it helps a little.