EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding has responded to concerns about the "right to be forgotten" provision in the new EU data protection framework, saying that the commission was clear in its expectations. "In principle, pure hosting services have no ownership and no responsibility for the content their users let them host...However, other information services, including social networking and search engines, may exercise control on the content, conditions and means of processing, thereby acting as data controllers. If and when this is the case, clearly they have to respect related data protection obligations," the commission wrote in a rebuttal letter sent to ZDNet UK. Google's Global Privacy Counsel Peter Fleischer wrote in a blog post that posters of information--not the companies running the platform--should be responsible for deleting the information.
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