I don't see it as a gray zone at all. There is a public record for a reason, as well as libel/slander laws in the U.S. The search engines and the Internet just think those don't matter. They are wrong, and the courts will continue to tweak the verbiage and hand down rulings until they adhere to them.
- If a local paper published the home address of a woman who was a private citizen in their paper, every single day, and her crazy ex-husband used that information to locate her and kill her, the newspaper would be liable. But the Internet does that all of the time and claims that it's free speech.
- If a person is convicted of a crime, does 10 years in prison, and serves their debt to society, that's still public record. An employer can find it even without doing a Google search, although that's what people are claiming is a 'grey area'. Is it 'fair' that the person's name immediately turns up their arrest record as the #1 result? Well, 'fair' and having done 10 years in prison don't really add up.
Here's the thing - in the U.S., people are up in arms over the 'right to be forgotten' and claiming it violates free speech. But that's not really true. Today, if there is inaccurate information about you - like, say, Google links to a website that says you were busted smoking crack in a nearby schoolyard, but it is completely untrue - you can go after the offending site and they will have to remove it under U.S. laws, and that means Google's links will evaporate. But this isn't the case in the E.U., where this law was passed.