To understand both the magnitude of the problem posed by Google and the confusion that exists from a legal point of view, it is essential to look at two keys: the first is the limitation of privacy laws, and the second is the ever-mutating revolution of the Internet.

Privacy protection, in most countries, was consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s. Laws were designed to target celebrities, actors, singers, politicians, etc., and, as a danger factor, the media.

The wall of privacy was not to be breached. In the 1980s, with the transformation of giant computers into manageable tools in thousands of offices, public and private institutions, hospitals, banks, university Departments , stores and so on, a new threat appeared: the indiscriminate recording, crossing and transfer of data - private or not - of citizens: the so-called personal data . But the second and final core topic to understand the current battle front is the Internet and the presence of search engines. Because their power to amplify the dissemination of any reference letter, written or audiovisual, about a person is simply infinite in space and time.

The world's largest search engine, is it legitimate to make such a management of the personal references of its more than one billion users? The United States is claiming the "right to forget".

Legal expert Jeffrey Rosen wrote in The New York Times supplement of July 25, 2010: "We have known for years that the Internet permits unprecedented voyeurism, exhibitionism and unconscious indiscretion, but we have only just begun to realize its cost, in an era when almost everything we say, and what others say about us, is permanently - and publicly - stored in digital archives. The fact that the Internet never forgets is threatening."

Since a 1983 ruling by the German Constitutional Court, Europe has been calling for the right to informational self-determination, i.e. the "School of the individual to determine fundamentally for himself the knowledge dissemination and use of data concerning his person", something that has come to the fore in the age of Google.