I stand by that characterization.

Then with due respect, your understanding of RTBF is objectively incorrect. It was never about allowing individuals to censor information about themselves just because they don't want it to be shared. You can read more from the EU itself:

http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/files/factsheets...

But I disagree with it because 1) it's too easily abused and 2) it doesn't work.

Is there actually any evidence that it's easily abused, or is that just an assumption?

For that matter, why doesn't it work? It seems clear that promoting information via a search engine will typically give that information much wider reach than just, say, publishing it on a blog somewhere or having an article on the web site for someone's local newspaper. If that information is incorrect or misleading, if we accept for the purposes of this discussion that distributing that information is therefore undesirable, and if we accept that the search engines themselves report that many links have been removed as a result of RTBF, how can the current situation not be having the intended effect?

Completely agree, but the answer to that is to not let that information get out in the first place.

Ideally, yes. I just don't think that means you give up on trying to limit harm to an individual, particularly an innocent one, if someone does screw up and let the cat out of the bag.

Actually, the real answer here is to remove the societal stigma associated with seeking help for mental health issues in the first place.

That's a noble goal, and one I fully support. However, I don't think it's realistic to expect everyone in society to treat everyone else objectively and fairly when faced with potentially negative information about them any time soon. Sadly, there is still far too much ignorance and prejudice in society for now. However, privacy is an effective practical tool for reducing the amount of unfairness that results from that kind of ignorance and prejudice.

Also, as I mentioned in another post, it's impossible to reliably achieve fair outcomes after initially encountering negative information, even with good intentions all round. If nothing else, someone who looks up an individual and initially finds negative information about them won't (and can't) know for sure whether there was also some later positive information that they should take into account as well. Short of reliably data mining and classifying the sum of all human knowledge so that any search that turned up negative data immediately highlighted the overriding positive data as well, there is no way to solve this problem 100% of the time.

What about the person you raped when you were 32?

When it comes to disclosures and background checks, there are usually some types of offence (typically violent or sexual ones) that are deemed sufficiently serious that convictions for those offences never become spent and will turn up on background searches forever, even if the legal system does consider lesser offences to be irrelevant after a certain period of time. I don't see why the same principles shouldn't apply for the same reasons in RTBF cases, and I would expect EU courts to do exactly that when applying the privacy and data protection rules.

We're in a shades-of-grey area here, and your example was a much darker shade of grey than mine, so it seems reasonable that there might be a different balance between allowing the past offender to move on and helping others to find information that might be relevant to their dealings with that past offender.