The right to be forgotten

Abstract

The right to be forgotten gained international attention in May 2014, when the European Court of Justice ruled that Google was obligated to recognize European citizens’ data protection rights to address inadequate, irrelevant, or excessive personal information. As of April 14, 2015, Google received 239,337 requests to eliminate 867,930 URLs from search results and has removed 305,095 URLs, a rate of 41.5 percent. The right to be forgotten is intended to legally address digital information that lingers and threatens to shackle individuals to their past by exposing the information to opaque data processing and online judgment. There are a number of challenges to developing these rights – digital information means and touches so many aspects of life across cultures as they grapple with new policies. The controversial ruling and establishment of such a right, potential for a similar movement in the U.S., and future of transborder data flows will be discussed by this esteemed panel.

Linking Platforms, Practices, and Developer Ethics: Levers for Privacy Discourse in Mobile Application Development

“…And cautionary tales taught developers that privacy violations might result in lawsuits. Largely missing were more stringent European perspectives on data protection (Jones 2016), or even non-western views more focused on communal norms than individual liberties (Capurro 2005). Some of the very American nature of our data is likely explained by the fact that we analyzed English-language forums (though each forum involved many international participants).…”

Infancy Online: An Introduction

“…The social, health and well-being value of sharing specific information about infants, from biomedical data to photos on Facebook, will have to be balanced with the impact of these traces having a lasting existence, potentially outside the control of parents or, as they grow, the children whose lives generated them. As the "right to be forgotten," is debated and, in some cases, enshrined in national legal systems, balancing, controlling, and in some cases erasing digital traces will undoubtedly prove complex and contradictory terrain (Jones, 2016). Veronica Barassi's "Babyveillance?…”

The Practice of General Data Protection Regulations Fine and Penalty on Google Inc. vs CNIL Case

“…Incorporating and developing such a right was explicitly stated as a goal of the European Commission when it declared intentions to update the 1995 European Union Data Protection Directive with the Data Protection Regulation, which would harmonize many of the national differences that had evolved under the Directive. The right to be forgotten was encoded in Article 17 of the 2012 draft Regulation and has since been retitled "the right to erasure" [25].…”