Big Data Could Sink Europe’s ‘Right to be Forgotten’

The problem with this law from the beginning was:<p>1) It assumes companies like Google/Facebook have full control of users' data. This is untrue: anything you post on Facebook is already out of Facebook (or it amounts to that: there is no control over what your 'friends' will do with it).<p>2) It is paternalistic: look, we the lawmakers (who are NOT the people of Europe but a bunch of guys and gals in an Ivory Tower) know that you the people are unable to restrain yourselves and will make things public of which you will later repent, so we want to grant you this power to 'erase' all of your data.<p>I know it is way more complicated than that but it boils down to those two ideas (dealing with specific data such as forms or automatically collected data -as phone calls, location via triangulation etc.- is quite different: these are data the Companies are not allowed to share in the first place).<p>As a Spaniard I am quite fed up with paternalism from Brussels.

It is great way to tax companies like Google and Facebook. 1 million fine for each day they wont comply, or ban in Europe. It's very simple, Watson.

The writer is exploiting the "could sink", "possibly doomed", angle; I'd say that a competent agency is doing properly its job, by explaining technical difficulties to be either overcome or accepted.<p>Just the act of disallowing data from having a certified source (even if some unreliable versions are inevitably available), would do much to uphold personal rights.