Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear and I was talking about a slightly different angle on the right to be forgotten. If there's a news site that reports on some

Sorry, I wasn't particularly clear and I was talking about a slightly different angle on the right to be forgotten. If there's a news site that reports on something old and normally irrelevant -- like a decades old conviction that's spent -- then you can ask Google not to return that report when someone searches for your name. Google won't go and take down the original page, though, and won't stop it appearing in other searches. The analogy I was given -- which I like -- is that before online searching, everything was reported in the newspapers. If you knew when something happened, you could quickly look it up in the archives, and if you wanted to know about someone in particular, you had to spend a week trawling. Without the right to be forgotten, small things that previously would be forgotten are much more easily remembered. The original right to be forgotten (pre-GDPR) is about fixing _that_. But the archive would still be there, to be trawled through if required, and even in the GDPR there's an exemption for things like news sites. The GDPR adds extra protections that are being lumped in the same bucket but are more in line with what the DPA in the UK already required: the right to ask a company to delete personal data they hold on you. GDPR also expands the scope of what counts as personal data that the company would have to delete. But at the end of the day, Google's not going to remove anyone else's pages.