The right to be forgotten - between expectations and practice

The right to be forgotten is included in the proposed regulation on data protection published by the European Commission in January 2012. The regulation is still to be adopted by the European Parliament for entering into force. The different legal aspects of the right to be forgotten (i.e. right to erasure or right to oblivion) have been debated in different contexts and are beyond the scope of this paper. With this paper we aim to cover other facets of the right to be forgotten. We focus on the technical means to enforce or support the right in information systems; as can be seen from this paper, there are technical limitations and there is a further need for clear definitions and legal clarifications.