The Economics of the Right to Be Forgotten

Abstract

We examine the underlying economics behind the emerging issue of the so-called "right to be forgotten," which subsumes the right for individuals to ask for 'inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive' information about them to be dropped from Internet searches. At stake is the conflict between the privacy right and other fundamental rights such as the freedom of speech, expression, and access to information. First, we analyze a legal dispute game between a petitioner, claiming the right to be forgotten, and an Internet search engine. In particular, we characterize conditions under which litigation arises as an equilibrium outcome. Then we provide comparative static results on the probability of lawsuits and the likelihood of broken-links, in connection to the social value of information. Our model offers a useful framework in understanding the effects of Europe's expansion of the right to be forgotten to non-European websites: If the European ruling applies to all global search engine domains, then the expected amount of broken-links would fall.