One of the daftest elements of the UK GDPR is the fact that a relative lean and specific right – to have personal data erased in certain circumstances – is given the highly misleading and unhelpful label of ‘right to be forgotten’. You don’t really have a right to be forgotten, but the phrase was applied to a series of court cases where claimants attempted and sometimes succeeded in having harmful or embarrassing stories about themselves delisted from search engines like Google.

Meanwhile, the GDPR allows people to exercise a right of erasure in a limited number of circumstances, mainly when the data is no longer required. It’s surprisingly narrow, but in this practical and entertaining video, I’ll tell you when it works, when it doesn’t and what the exemptions to it are.