A right to be forgotten - that is, not to be mentioned somewhere - looks more like a negative right, not unlike a right not to be mugged or not to be photographed in your own bathroom through an open window. A right to be remembered would be a positive right - not unlike a right to be employed or fed.

(You could say that "forgetting" published material requires action and not inaction - but so does editing out someone videotaped in their own bathroom through an open window, and so does not running over pedestrians, strictly speaking; generally as programmers know following rules to not do something requires some sort of computation which is a form of action... but that means inaction takes action and then all rights are positive.)

Seriously? How can we expect legislation to protect our privacy but not the privacy of those that we don't like?

Your comment is exactly like Eric Schmidt saying "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." and then pushing for drone control to keep his own privacy.

I don't think you know what privacy means and I'm not defending Eric Schmidt here.

Getting busted for drunk driving, with a news story as a side effect - that's public information, not private. And if indeed you prove your innocence with a blood test, you can always ask the newspaper to retract their story or sue for defamation. But again, getting caught drunk while driving, that's public information, not private, so privacy doesn't enter the picture.

Just to be clear, lets try some samples:

PUBLIC: a picture with you drunk done by somebody else

PRIVATE: a selfie with you drunk that's stored on your laptop or DropBox or GDrive

PUBLIC: a record of you being at a Starbucks at 12:00 this Monday

PRIVATE: your track record of where you've been hanging out every day at 12:00 in the last month

PUBLIC: your face

PRIVATE: your social security number

PUBLIC: your sexual orientation

PRIVATE: your sexual orientation

Can you spot any differences? As a hint - privacy is the right to protect private information about yourself, but it's definitely not the right to hide information that's already public.

Of course, I can see the rationale behind the "Right to be Forgotten". I could agree with it. Except for the fact that I live in a country in which corruption is a problem - and this right will be used for censoring acts of corruption and I have a problem with this.

> PUBLIC: a record of you being at a Starbucks at 12:00 this Monday

> PRIVATE: your track record of where you've been hanging out every day at 12:00 in the last month

This seems problematic. What is it about the aggregate information that makes it private? That is, at what point does a collection of individually public data become private? (I agree that it should, but would have trouble defining the precise point at which it does.)

> PUBLIC: your sexual orientation

> PRIVATE: your sexual orientation

I guess that this was intentional, but I think that I don't understand. Do you mean that sexual activities that are undertaken in public (I can't come up with a good way to phrase that—I mean innocently, things like dating and such) are public, and sexual activities that are undertaken, say, in the bedroom are private?

I'd guess that the point is your sexual orientation is both since it isn't really anyone else's business, but obviously your partners (even if they are super secret partners) will know, making it public?

Why?