Right to be Forgotten

The right to be forgotten, also commonly known as the right to erasure, is the idea that an individual should have the ability to erase parts of their online identity in which the information is no longer needed for its original processing purpose. This idea arose from individuals who believed that they should be able to control whether or not their information persists online. In the European Union (EU) and Argentina this right has already been implemented with the creation of a law which allows citizens to request that their information is removed from google's search results. The right to be forgotten brings up a number of issues concerning the relationship between internet censorship and the right to privacy, as well as online anonymity problems.

History

Before the expansion of the internet and search engines such as Google and Yahoo, the right to be forgotten didn't come into conception until recently. In the Pre-internet era, data was not as easily accessible due to its physical nature and public records were difficult to obtain which lead to "practical obscurity" of people's data. This means that the data is effectively protected due to the practical difficulty to access it. Following the digitization of records as well as the expansion of digital libraries for search engines, data became more easily accessible and the right to be forgotten began to come into conception. In 2014, a landmark case of Google vs. Costeja made the right to be forgotten a well known concept.