Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, has a personal blog where he shares his own (not his boss’s) thoughts. He writes:
In privacy circles, everybody’s talking about the Right to be Forgotten. The European Commission has even proposed that the “right to be forgotten” should be written into the up-coming revision of the Privacy Directive. Originally, a rather curious French “universal right” that doesn’t even have a proper English-translation (right to be forgotten? right to oblivion? right to delete?), le Doit a l’Oubli, is going mainstream. But, what on earth is it? For most people, I think it’s an attempt to give people the right to wash away digital muck, or delete the embarrassing stuff, or just start fresh. But unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that.
Peter then goes on to frame the issue as a series of specific scenarios or questions.
It’s a really thoughtfully written post, and I encourage readers to read it all.
Via Kashmir Hill, who provides her own commentary on Peter’s comments.