The right to be forgotten sounds appealing, it really does. When I first heard about it it sounded like something I liked. However the more I thought about it the more I thought about the **AA's playing whackamole and the logistical nightmares of actually trying to implement such a thing. The next problem is how do you separate it from censorship? It's also next to impossible to cleanly state when and where it should be granted.
Can you demand the right to be forgotten by corporate databases? Facebook sounds easy enough, but what about credit agencies, employers and news agencies? In practice I think it would be next to impossible to implement, as the **AA's have found out time and again - the Internet never forgets.
You also have cases of legitimate needs. I had a bad renter that stayed with me last year. Should he be able to demand the right to be forgotten so that he can get out of a bad referral? How about employers that have bad employees? I worked with a guy that was fired for hosting kiddie porn from a server at work. This guy still tries to get work in the field, should he be able to demand the right to be forgotten by his employer of 20 some years so that he can put down his experience without anyone being able to conduct a background check?
What about news agencies that reported on people that were in the news? Richard Jewell was wrongly described as the bomber for Atlantic City Olympic bombing by many news agencies who did a half ass job of news coverage. Does he have a legitimate right to be forgotten? His life was ruined without cause (he was innocent) and surely he would have cause to be forgotten if anyone would. Or does the fact that he was internationally famous as the person to discover a bomb at the Olympics and then be wrongly blamed for it's placement trump his personal case?
What about the arguments against censorship of people. Hypothetical Bob has his account on Facebook and wants everything about him removed from Facebook. Susan remembers Bob before he went crazy and wants to keep his picture up from their wedding. Does Bob's desire to remove himself from Facebook trump Susan's right to remember her husband as he was before he took the crazy train out of town?
What about government records, are those something that you can demand be forgotten? Many police agencies now host open records of who has been arrested and post this information on their website. If someone is arrested do they have a right to have that information forgotten?
Even if you had a clear legal structure that could say when and where someone had the right to be forgotten, without crossing over into censorship, how on earth are you going to do it? I would lay the last dollar I had that you probably couldn't name 10% of the companies that had information on you if your in a typical first world country.