If Google can handle the millions of requests it gets to take down content that infringes copyright, it should be able to handle the few requests it gets to enforce the EU's "right to be forgotten", according to Viviane Reding, the European commissioner for justice, fundamental rights and citizenship.

Speaking on BBC Radio 5 Live, Reding said that "there are relatively little numbers of requests" to take down information owing to the newly granted right to be forgotten, but that there are "some million requests to take down material because of copyright questions."

"So you see," Reding continued, "this is a small thing as compared to the copyright things. It is possible to handle the copyright question, so it should also be possible to handle the takedown requests on personal data questions."

Google announced that it had received 12,000 requests from individuals to remove their personal data from the search engine in the first day it had accepted such requests. The company's own figures show that it has received more than 23 million requests for URLs to be removed owing to allegations of copyright infringement in the past month, equal to 787,000 such requests every day.

Reding said that there were three situations where such requests to be forgotten could be made. Individuals can "remove the data they handed themselves out to the search engines, in order [for] the search engines to utilise it; the data which has been put online [by an individual] can also be taken offline again; and then data which the search engines put in a prominent position [can be removed] when it is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive, as the court has clearly said."

Addressing the inevitable subjectivity of decisions over whether information is "irrelevant", Reding said that "everything is subjective in human relations". But she pointed to a recent agreement by national data protection authorities to form a subcommittee to agree on a unifrom way to handle such requests as an "important" move.

Reding argued that although the judgment was only handed down by the court recently, "this decision has been taken in 1995," when the European law which protects individuals' data was drafted. "We have wide European law that was applied in all member states," she told the BBC, "and the only ones who refused to apply European law in European territories were some American companies. It took the European court of justice to remind them that they have to apply the law like everyone else."

"EU law which is agreed by all member states has to be applied by all companies. Not just EU companies, but also those who use our internal market as a goldmine."

BBC Radio 5 also heard from Bradley, an engineer who had requested that Google remove his personal data relating to a drink-driving conviction in 2006. Bradley, who requested that his surname not be used, lost his job some years later after his conviction was discovered by a union representative googling him.

"I can't erase history, and people have always been able to ask the police if someone's got a conviction," he said. "But you don't need the internet there, people googling their names, and ruining their lives.

"I don't expect it to be taken down, I can only ask. It might make a difference to somebody else; I've already lost my job, lost my career, lost my pension."

Writing in the Guardian on Wednesday, Luciano Floridi, one of the external experts brought in to advise Google on the ruling, said current European data protection law is outdated.

"I see it as the expression of a time when there was a clear divide between online and offline," he said. "Today, that divide is being bridged in favour of the 'onlife', a mixture of analogue and digital, physical and virtual experiences, like driving a car following the instructions of a navigator."

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