With the Internet, our identities have metastasized. This situation is intensified by the fact that services like Google and Facebook have an incentive to keep as much information about their users as public as possible, constantly prompting and rewarding the addition of more personal data so as to better sell their users to advertisers. The right to be forgotten restores some of the agency the individual has lost against the companies already dominating the Internet.

Provisions can be made so that the law interferes minimally with media outlets rightfully publishing important information. But at its core, this isn’t a law for celebrities or businesses or journalists. It is meant for the average Internet user, one who has no way to manage what happens to what they put online or how the Internet represents them. “In a year, we predict there will be between half a million and a million request forms for Google,” Girin says. “We think there’s a real need for this in the general public.”

After all, if you don’t want your religious views, address, or sexual orientation revealed online, who can refuse? Privacy is a necessary right, Girin argues. “Freedom in a democracy is being able have your own little secret garden,” he says.