Internet Privacy: The Right To Be Forgotten

Internet Privacy-The right to be forgotten (The EU, US and the Indian perspective & The challenges associated with it)

Privacy: - Meaning & its importance

Privacy in normal parlance means solitude, seclusion, the person prefers to be in such a state whereby he is secluded from the world at large. The “right to privacy” means the right to be left alone to live one’s own life with the minimum degree of interference. Internet is now considered as a serious threat to privacy, with the scope of Internet expanding manifold as the Internet gives liberty to every person to express their opinions about everything freely it is said to give voice to the voiceless, it gives ample scope for anonymity, and anonymity is the biggest threat which cyber lawyers

The right to be forgotten is one such right, which a person couldn’t have imagined the same few years back, but with the rise of the social media and the growing importance of search engines, the need for such a right to be developed arises. It’s not a right to be purged from the memory of people who know you, but rather to control how information about you appears online. If there is no legitimate reason for keeping it, the data should be removed from their system. The ruling in the Costeja case emphatically stated that wherever it appears that the information is “incorrect, inaccurate, irrelevant or excessive for the processes of data processing, individuals have a right to ask the search engines to remove the links with personal information about them. The right to be forgotten is indeed a valuable tool for keeping a check on the content which is being linked online by the search engines, but at the same time it is becomes a dangerous tools in the hands of the people who demand the content to be removed which could also be considered as a threat to freedom of speech and expression, say for instance a leader of political party who is a probable candidate for some elections would definitely want to segregate the flattery news about him displayed on the search engines from the news which is not going to get him votes from the public. The right to be forgotten provides a mechanism whereby information which interferes with the private life of a person can be de-linked from the search engine, but at the same time if the information is necessary for public interest or if the activity of the person is within the public domain such information cannot be de-linked, as it is important for the people to be aware of it. The ruling also exempts information, which is being displayed purely for “journalistic