Right to be forgotten

The right to be forgotten is a concept discussed and put into practice in the European Union (EU) and Argentina since 2006. The issue has arisen from desires of individuals to "determine the development of their life in an autonomous way, without being perpetually or periodically stigmatized as a consequence of a specific action performed in the past."

There has been controversy about the practicality of establishing a right to be forgotten to the status of an international human right in respect to access to information, due in part to the vagueness of current rulings attempting to implement such a right. There are concerns about its impact on the right to freedom of expression, its interaction with the right to privacy, and whether creating a right to be forgotten would decrease the quality of the Internet through censorship and a rewriting of history, and opposing concerns about problems such as revenge porn sites appearing in search engine listings for a person's name, or references to petty crimes committed many years ago indefinitely remaining an unduly prominent part of a person's Internet footprint.

Europe’s data protection laws are intended to secure potentially damaging, private information about individuals. The notion of "the right to be forgotten" is derived from numerous preexisting European ideas. There is a longstanding belief in the United Kingdom, specifically under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, that after a certain period of time, many criminal convictions are “spent”, meaning that information regarding said person should not be regarded when obtaining insurance or seeking employment. Similarly, France values this right - le droit d’oubli (the right to be forgotten). It was officially recognized in French Law in 2010. Views on the right to be forgotten differ greatly between America and EU countries. In America, transparency, the right of free speech according to the First Amendment, and the right to know have typically been favored over the obliteration of truthfully published information regarding individuals and corporations. The term "right to be forgotten" is a relatively new idea, though on May 13, 2014 the European Court of Justice legally solidified that the "right to be forgotten” is a human right when they ruled against Google in the Costeja case.

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