Comment Re:Who didn't see this coming? (Score 2) 135
Well, it's simple.
The American way of life (or understanding Privacy) is that information about Mr. X, that is collected by some company is the property of said company.
The European concept in Privacy is that any data about Mr. X is basically always the property of Mr. X, and any company wanting to store/process/... that data needs a legal authorization to do so. (That can be explicit by law, there are some general cases where other laws imply the right to process data, e.g. accounting/taxing rules, or by personal consent.) Even if a a company processes data about Mr. X legally, Mr. X has a number of rights (e.g. withdrawal of permission => deletion, correction of data, and naturally as a first, a right to query any data linked with him by the company). The stuff is complicated by the fact that privacy protection is currently regulated by the member countries, based on a common guideline.
If you think about this for a moment, you'll realize that these two concepts are very incompatible. The Politicians decided to paper over this with the "US-EU Safe Harbour Agreement", and currently some of the high level courts in the EU are finding that the Agreement is not exactly working as advertised.
Considering the right to be "forgotten", if you think about this, it's obviously covered by existing law:
* Google is not some kind of Publisher (that would be an argument that they have a legal authorization from laws covering Journalism), so it's a data processor of data that can be linked to an individual.
* Hence the right to delete stuff (withdraw the permission to process data about Mr. X.) obviously applies.