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Timing the Right to Be Forgotten: A Study into 'Time' as a Factor in Deciding About Retention or Erasure of Data
Abstract
The so-called "Right to Be Forgotten or Erasure" (RTBF), article 17 of the proposed General Data Protection Regulation, provides individuals with a means to oppose the often persistent digital memory of the Web. Because digital information technologies affect the accessibility of information over time and time plays a fundamental role in biological forgetting, ‘time’ is a factor that should play a pivotal role in the RTBF. This chapter explores the roles that ‘time’ plays and could play in decisions regarding the retention or erasure of data. Two roles are identified: (1) ‘time’ as the marker of a discrete moment where the grounds for retention no longer hold and ‘forgetting’ of the data should follow and (2) ‘time’ as a factor in the balance of interests, as adding or removing weight to the request to ‘forget’ personal information or its opposing interest. The chapter elaborates on these two roles from different perspectives and highlights the importance and underdeveloped understanding of the second role.
... En efecto, basta con que su nombre esté conectado a dichos materiales a través de motores de búsqueda web y similares para causar significativa vergüenza, estigma o daño. Korenhof, Ausloos et al. (2014) afirman que los seres humanos siempre han usado memorias externas, pero con la adopción de la tecnología de la información, los mecanismos de "recordar" y "olvidar" en los procesos de la memoria externa parecen haber cambiado drásticamente. El olvido en el cerebro humano surge por la combinación de varios factores. ...
Since massification of digital technology occurred in 1990s, all social, communicative and cultural environment was changed, but perhaps one of the darkest aspects of this new reality is the amount of personal, financial, political or institutional data circulating in cyberspace, many of which can not be erased. The concept of memory it seem to acquire new meanings in the digital age, so in this paper attempts to reflect on cyberspace, memory and the low chance of digital oblivion, so that a new law raises, called the right to be forgotten.
... In this context, the RTBF's role is to enable users to control their personal history to achieve so-called social forgiveness (e.g. Korenhof et al., 2014;Mayer-Schönberger, 2009) and allow them to reinvent their digital persona (Novotny and Spiekermann, 2014). The European Commission (2012) integrated part of Mayer-Schönberger's ideas into its 2012 draft of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to aid individuals in enforcing their informational self-determination. ...
Since the ruling of the European Court of Justice, the right to be forgotten has provided more informational self-determination to users, whilst raising new questions around Google’s role as arbiter of online content and the power to rewrite history. We investigated the debate that unfolded on Twitter around the #righttobeforgotten through social network analysis. The results revealed that latent topics, namely Google’s role as authority, alternated in popularity with rising and fading flare topics. The public sphere, or Öffentlichkeit, that we observed resembles the traditional one, with elite players such as news portals, experts and corporations participating, but it also differs significantly in terms of the underlying mechanisms and means of information diffusion. Experts are critical to comment, relay and make sense of information. We discuss the implications for theories of the public sphere and examine why social media do not serve as a democratising tool for ordinary citizens.
This paper strives to form a part of the broader debate on the potential threats which the right to be forgotten may pose to freedom of expression on the internet. To that end, it examines the relevant case law of the Spanish courts, which have had the opportunity to develop a substantial practice in applying the right to be forgotten to search engines. The paper begins by highlighting the main guiding standards of the right to be forgotten, the notion of harm, and the interconnected ideas of the “public” and its interest. This is followed by a discussion on the relationship between these standards and freedom of expression. In this respect, it is posited that the central standard is the “public” and its interest. In Spanish law, the right to receive accurate information has had a dominant impact in providing substance to this standard. Because this is only one aspect of the more general freedom of expression, this right is more likely to favour the processing of data that occurs in a context similar to journalism. By applying it in ‘right to be forgotten’ cases, a particular temporality of freedom of expression is introduced. Consequently, the processing of personal data that can be justified by providing information in the interest of the collective existence of a political community is more likely to be immune to the right to be forgotten. Nevertheless, it is argued that the right to be forgotten does not pose a threat to freedom of expression. This is particularly so given that its impact is largely neutralised by its restricted field of application, making it effective only in relation to specific internet searches.
Upon the GDPR's application on 25 May 2018 across the European Union, new legal requirements for the protection of personal data will be enforced for data controllers operating within the EU territory. While the principles encompassed by the GDPR were mostly welcomed, two of them; namely the right to withdraw consent and the right to be forgotten, caused prolonged controversy among privacy scholars, human rights advocates and business world due to their pivotal impact on the way personal data would be handled under the new legal provisions and the drastic consequences of enforcing these new requirements in the era of big data and internet of things. In this work, we firstly review all controversies around the new stringent definitions of consent revocation and the right to be forgotten in reference to their implementation impact on privacy and personal data protection, and secondly, we evaluate existing methods, architectures and state-of-the-art technologies in terms of fulfilling the technical practicalities for the implementation and effective integration of the new requirements into current computing infrastructures. The latter allow us to argue that such enforcement is indeed feasible provided that implementation guidelines and low-level business specifications are put in place in a clear and cross-platform manner in order to cater for all possible exceptions and complexities.
Advances in telecommunications have brought many changes to our daily lives, one of which is the change in the norm of privacy. With the convenience in viewing and (re)distributing contents, on top of the permanency of contents on the Internet, privacy has become more of a concern than ever. The concern is even greater for the younger generation, because they are eager to share and less sensitive to privacy. The European Union recently has recognized that people have the right to control their own information, even after they have become publicly available. The European Union commission proposed an update in the fundamental data protection regulations, including the so-called “right to be forgotten.” However, securing the right to be forgotten is not possible with a regulation set only for one region. In the United States, where the majority of companies handling online information are based, this type of right is readily rejected because it is considered to directly violate the First Amendment’s freedom of expression. This chapter considers how to balance the freedom to express and adolescents’ right to be “forgotten.”
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