I've always kind of thought a better system would be one that lets you assume a new identity. This is a war that laws won't win. Data will get out, and once it's out, it's near impossible to get back. And people do make mistakes that shouldn't haunt them for the rest of their lives. A better system is one that lets you disassociate with that data.

A restaurant could do exactly that. If the negative publicity for something they did only a couple of years ago is too much for them, they could change their name in a heartbeat.

Instead, what they want is to selectively groom what the internet "remembers" about them. Remove the bad, keep the good.

There is a local upmarket curry house near me that is quite good and has been around for nearly 5 years winning plenty of local awards for food and service, but on TripAdvisor about 1/5 of the reviews refer to a steak house that was at the same address before this curry house opened. They did not get good reviews and didn't pass health inspections. Even though the curry house changed the owner, name, management, waiting staff, chefs, food sourcing, decor, and menu the reviews are still tied to the address.

Fortunately their newer reviews are so glowing that they still get over 4 stars average and their front window is covered in plaques of their awards and their most recent 5/5 health inspection (in the UK its quite common for restaurants to flaunt their 4/5 or 5/5 health report on their front door as advertising - there is no legal requirement to show it except in the city of Hull where now almost every restaurant now has at least 4/5 rating as a consequence given the death sentence that a something below 3/5 represents).

It'd be pretty hard to get the new identity without revealing that you are in fact changing from identity X to identity Y. Because if that tidbit gets out, an algorithm can easily reassociate all the data of identity X with identity Y.

Can you imagine the New Identity fraud!

This is a very good point. This is more of a distant idea that I've had, rather than a fully fledged out one, so I'm sure there are plenty of pitfalls that I haven't thought of.

Couldn't identity fraud be better handled if we had a system in place for it though? "Oh, my identity was stolen. Time to get a new one!"

How does a legal action involving a public business have anything to do with privacy? This isn't someone trying to take down embarrassing vacation photos from a FB page, this is a business trying to hide their misdeeds that were significant enough to be reported on in the first place.

The EU's privacy laws are much broader than the "right to be forgotten" (which do not apply to public figures anyway, as Google has shown in the past).

When a disgruntled ex publishes a page saying you have a bunch of STDs[1], or a company crawls your social media info and starts using it to market some product without your conscent, and these are the first things your cutomers (and/or friends) see when they google you... you're happy takedown requests are a thing and there are laws to protect you.