EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding is in the U.S. this week and was scheduled to meet with Attorney General Eric Holder on ways the U.S. and E.U. can cooperate on protecting consumer data.

Commissioner Reding also met with the Washington Post‘s Cecilia Kang to discuss the relationship between E.U. and U.S. conceptions of privacy.  They discussed the “right to be forgotten” — an idea that Commissioner Reding introduced last month.  Commissioner Reding explained that a person’s data should belong to him or her, not a commercial entity or the state, and emphasized the importance of being able to delete data stored online or port it to another online platform.  While data portability is a popular concept in the U.S., Commissioner Reding’s conception of data ownership is not universally adhered to in the U.S.