The EU Proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation and the roots of the ‘right to be forgotten’

The EU Proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation has caused a wide debate between lawyers and legal scholars and many opinions have been voiced on the issue of the right to be forgotten. In order to analyse the relevance of the new rule provided by Article 17 of the Proposal, this paper considers the original idea of the right to be forgotten, pre-existing in both European and U.S. legal frameworks. This article focuses on the new provisions of Article 17 of the EU Proposal for a General Data Protection Regulation and evaluates its effects on court decisions. The author assumes that the new provisions do not seem to represent a revolutionary change to the existing rules with regard to the right granted to the individual, but instead have an impact on the extension of the protection of the information disseminated on-line.