Right to be forgotten

The right to be forgotten (RTBF) is the right to have private information about a person be removed from Internet searches and other directories under some circumstances. The concept has been discussed and put into practice in several jurisdictions, including Argentina, the European Union (EU), and the Philippines. 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.": 231 

The right to be forgotten "reflects the claim of an individual to have certain data deleted so that third persons can no longer trace them.": 121  It has been defined as "the right to silence on past events in life that are no longer occurring." The right to be forgotten leads to allowing individuals to have information, videos, or photographs about themselves deleted from certain Internet records so that they cannot be found by search engines. As of 2011, there were few protections against the harm caused by incidents such as revenge porn sharing, or by pictures uploaded due to poor judgment.

The right to be forgotten is distinct from the right to privacy. The right to privacy constitutes information that is not publicly known, whereas the right to be forgotten involves removing information that was publicly known at a certain time and not allowing third parties to access the information.: 122 

There has been controversy about the practicality of establishing a right to be forgotten (in respect to access of information) as an international human right. This is partly due to the vagueness of current rulings attempting to implement such a right. Furthermore, 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 the rewriting of history. Those in favor of the right to be forgotten cite its necessity due to issues such as revenge porn sites appearing in search engine listings for a person's name, as well as instances of these results referencing petty crimes individuals may have committed in the past. The central concern lies in the potentially undue influence that such results may exert upon a person's online reputation almost indefinitely if not removed.

Limitations of application in a jurisdiction include the inability to require removal of information held by companies outside the jurisdiction. There is no global framework to allow individuals control over their online image. However, Professor Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, an expert from Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, said that Google cannot escape compliance with the law of France implementing the decision of the European Court of Justice in 2014 on the right to be forgotten. Mayer-Schönberger said nations, including the US, had long maintained that their local laws have "extra-territorial effects".

Recognition by jurisdiction

Argentina

Argentina has seen lawsuits by celebrities against Google and Yahoo! in which the plaintiffs demand the removal of certain search results, and require removal of links to photographs. One case, brought by artist Virginia da Cunha, involved photographs which had originally been taken with her permission and uploaded with her permission, however she alleged that the search results improperly associated her photographs with pornography. De Cunha's case achieved initial success resulting in Argentina search engines not showing images of the particular celebrity, however, this decision is on appeal.

Virginia Simari, the judge in favor of De Cunha, stated that people have the right to control their image and avert others from "capturing, reproducing, broadcasting, or publishing one's image without permission." In addition, Simari used a treatise written by Julio César Rivera, a Buenos Aires lawyer, author, and law professor "the right to control one's personal data includes the right to prevent others from using one's image." Since the 1990s Argentina has also been a part of the habeas data movement in which they "adopted a constitutional provision that is part freedom-of-government-information law and part data privacy law." Their version is known as Amparo. Article 43 explains it:

"Any person shall file this action to obtain information on the data about himself and their purpose, registered in public records or databases, or in private ones intended to supply information; and in case of false data or discrimination, this action may be filed to request the suppression, rectification, confidentiality or updating of said data."

Argentina's efforts to protect their people's right to be forgotten has been called "the most complete"[by whom?] because individuals are able to correct, delete, or update information about themselves. Overall, their information is bound to remain confidential.

China

In May 2016, Chinese courts in Beijing determined citizens do not have the right to be forgotten when a judge ruled in favor of Baidu in a lawsuit over removing search results. It was the first of such cases to be heard in Chinese court. In the suit, Ren Jiayu sued Chinese search engine Baidu over search results that associated him with a previous employer, Wuxi Taoshi Biotechnology. Ren argued that by posting the search results, Baidu had infringed upon his right of name and right of reputation, both protected under Chinese law. Because of these protections, Ren believed he had a right to be forgotten by removing these search results. The court ruled against Ren, claiming his name is a collection of common characters and as a result the search results were derived from relevant words.

Nowhere in China's civil code are the concepts of privacy or the right to be forgotten discussed. There is no data protection authority, nor a specific state agency in place to monitor the protection of citizens' personal data. In China today[when?], data protection regulation is aimed at consumers, on an individual level, in contrast to the EU's right to privacy, in which the individual is considered a "data subject", with the right to be protected. Chinese legislative progress towards supporting the right to be forgotten is slow. The topic has been debated for more than 10 years now,[when?] and continues to be a challenge. Small provisions have been implemented related to personal data processing, but do not amount to a comprehensive data protection regime. The European Union Directorate-General for Internal Policies has issued policy recommendations on a realistic, rather than a legalistic basis for data protection as to the transfer of data between the EU and China vis-a-vis the latter's lack of compatible regulation in this area.

European Union

Conceptual overview of Oblivion

Security researchers from CISPA, Saarland University and the University of Auckland proposed a framework, called Oblivion, to support the automation of the right to be forgotten in a scalable, provable and privacy-preserving manner. Oblivion is a program that helps to "automate" the process of attempting to verify someone's personal information that could be found in a Google search result." Google gets many take-down requests in a short amount of time, and Oblivion might help with this problem. Researchers and authors behind Oblivion say that "it is essential to develop techniques that at least partly automate this process and are scalable to Internet size." Oblivion helps the humans who review the forms at Google ensure that antagonistic users cannot "blacklist links to Internet sources that do not affect them." For example, tests have proven that Oblivion handles requests at a rate of 278 per second. The software allows Google, the government, and the user to work together to get content removed quickly and for just cause. In order to ensure that the program works quickly, is secure for its users and is impervious to fake take-down requests, Oblivion uses a three-part system.

In the first part, Oblivion requires a user to submit identification about themselves – not limited to "name, age, and nationality." Oblivion then enables a user to automatically find and tag his or her disseminated personal information using natural language processing and image recognition techniques and file a request in a privacy-preserving manner. Oblivion will scan the article for attributes that match information that has been submitted by the user. Second, Oblivion provides indexing systems with an automated and provable eligibility mechanism, asserting that the author of a request is indeed affected by an online resource. The author of a request is then issued an "ownership token" that confirms the articles they submitted for evaluation include sensitive personal information. The automated eligibility proof ensures censorship-resistance so that only legitimately affected individuals can request the removal of corresponding links from search results. In the third and last phase, this "ownership token" is submitted to Google, accompanied by the user's concerns as to what information should be deleted. Google's staff is then allowed to decide for themselves if they want to delete this information or not - but thanks to Oblivion, they know that the information in question is valid.

Researchers with Oblivion, however, have noted that it comes with some limitations. The software is lacking a human element, therefore it cannot decide on its own "whether or not a piece of information is public interest and should therefore not be removed from Google search results." Researchers have conducted comprehensive evaluations, showing that Oblivion is suitable for large-scale deployment once it is fine-tuned.

Data deletion protocols around the death of a user is another consideration.

See also


This page was last updated at 2023-05-15 01:58 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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