The Right to be Forgotten: an Islamic Perspective

THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN IN EUROPEAN UNION AND THE US, 2022

In digital era, access to information is very high and easy. Especially, the internet is the unique information pool and search engine operators have offers high opportunity to reach information. Although the access to information sounds good at first glance, some information is bad memory of individuals in theirs past. Especially, search engine operators make easier to access such information from news websites. As a result of this situation, individuals may would like to remove the content of these information from the websites based on the right to be forgotten. However, it is not still recognized universal human rights. The EU law and the US law have opposite approaches related to removal the content and the right to be forgotten. The GDPR(General Data Protection Regulation) recognizes the right to be forgotten in Europe but there is no relevant legislation which recognizes the Right to be Forgotten in the US. While it is possible to remove bad memories from the websites under European Union law as a rule, the US law rejects the right to be forgotten in favour of the freedom of expression. This situation is related to the liability of the websites and search engine operators. The purpose of this paper addresses the comparison of two opposite approaches on the right to be forgotten.

Few would argue against a reform on the current European data protection regime as much has changed in the digital world since the implementation of the Directive 95/46/EC (the Directive), in 1995. One of the most contentious issues is the so-called “right to be forgotten” (RTBF) which re-emerged after the delivery of the judgement of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the matter of, the colloquially known as, the Google case in mid 2014. Much of the controversy surrounding this case has focused on the impact of the ruling on freedom of expression and the right of access to information. The essay will attempt in Part I to define and sketch the theoretical scope of the RTBF. Part II will refer to the Google case in order to put some content on the right and describe its repercussions. Part III will examine whether the newly created right substantially interferes with the right to freedom of expression from a more general perspective. Part IV will give a prediction on the applicability of the right in the near future, regionally and globally. Lastly, an answer in the main question will be attempted from a personal perspective.

The term “right to be forgotten” is used today to represent a multitude of rights, and this fact causes difficulties in interpretation, analysis, and comprehension of such rights. These rights have become of utmost importance due to the increased risks to the privacy of individuals on the Internet, where social media, blogs, fora, and other outlets have entered into common use as part of human expression. Search engines, as Internet intermediaries, have been enrolled to assist in the attempt to regulate the Internet, and the rights falling under the moniker of the “right to be forgotten,” without truly knowing the extent of the related rights. In part to alleviate such problems, and focusing on digital technology and media, this paper proposes a taxonomy to identify various rights from different countries, which today are often regrouped under the banner “right to be forgotten,” and to do so in an understandable and coherent way. As an integral part of this exercise, this study aims to measure the extent to which there is a convergence of legal rules internationally in order to regulate private life on the Internet and to elucidate the impact that the important Google Spain “right to be forgotten” ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union has had on law in other jurisdictions on this matter. This paper will first introduce the definition and context of the “right to be forgotten.” Second, it will trace some of the sources of the rights discussed around the world to survey various forms of the “right to be forgotten” internationally and propose a taxonomy. This work will allow for a determination on whether there is a convergence of norms egarding the “right to be forgotten” and, more generally, with respect to privacy and personal data protection laws. Finally, this paper will provide certain criteria for the relevant rights and organize them into a proposed analytical grid to establish more precisely the proposed taxonomy of the “right to be forgotten” for the use of scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and students alike.

Masaryk University Journal of Law and Technology

The dynamic development of digital and informational technologies raises the issue of proper and effective protection of human privacy, which, in turn, is gradually turning from a real fundamental right into a kind of illusion. Just a piece of information about an individual distributed on the Internet may leave its negative and often indelible mark on the life and reputation of the addressee of such information, regardless of the legality and reliability of such information. And even if such information is subsequently recognized as false and/or vicious and even removed from public access, the addressee of the information will still be associated with such information in the social consciousness. In this regard, each person is at risk on the Internet, where anyone can potentially become the victim of a single publication or a post of an Internet user. In this context the emergence of the phenomenon of the right to be forgotten in European legal reality may be considered as a step f...

This article, written from the perspective of one of the members of Google Advisory Council, analyses some of the most pressing problems raised by the debate on the so-called “right to be forgotten”. Its main theses are that: (i) the debate about the so-called “right to be forgotten” (delinking) concerns cases in which it is no longer appropriate for a non-local search engine to provide a link to truthful information about a person that a third-party has legally published online; (ii) neither the right to be forgotten nor the right to information are real right, they are proxies for the right to privacy and the right to freedom of speech; (iii) it is privacy and freedom of speech that collide in the debate on the right to be forgotten, and it is a mistake to argue that they cannot be in a genuine and substantial contrast; (iv) the debate should acknowledge that there is a new distinction between available and accessible information online, and that today those who control the map (links) control the territory (contents); (v) publishers should be involved as early and as much as possible in any decision about delinking their contents; (vi) the territoriality issue is due to a misalignment of two different spaces, one physical and the other logical, and a solution should be found by working on the logical space of information, until such a solution is found, an effective compromise is to delink content at a national level only, although doing so a the European level if fine because it makes no significant difference, whereas any global delinking should be resisted until an international agreement is reached; and finally (vii) the definition of “data controller” and “data processor” should be significantly improved.

2015

Since the beginning of the digital age, the balance between forgetting and remembering changed as Viktor Mayer-Schonberger mentioned. Before the penetration of digital media into the everyday life forgetting was the norm and remembering the exception. Thus, the power of the society belonged to the interest not to be forgotten. Today in the digital age with all the search engines like google and bing there is a shift in the balance between remembering and forgetting. This article reveals the importance of the right to be forgotten and the diffi culties of the legal implementation which is discussed nowadays. In this article, fi rst of all the different kind of privacy should be described in the change of it in the digital age. Afterwards the effect of the change of whoness into a digital whoness and its consequences will be shown.

Juris Cognita Publications, 2024

The Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF), which captures the complex relationship between an individual's right to privacy and the larger social value of freedom of speech, is a fundamental concept in today's digital world. The RTBF, which has its roots in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union, recognises that people need to have the authority to decide how their personal information is shared online. On the other hand, the RTBF's implementation has sparked a variety of disputes that touch on practical, moral, and legal issues. The fundamental conflict that the RTBF creates between the right to privacy and the freedom of speech is at the centre of the debate. The European Court of Justice's (ECJ) standards for deciding RTBF requests are examined in this article, along with the consequences for users, online communities, and society at large. It also examines the difficulties that arise when the RTBF is put into practice, such as the overwhelming number of requests, jurisdictional inconsistencies, and the subtleties involved in determining what the public interest is. The paper emphasises the significance of finding a careful balance between the rights to privacy and expression through a comprehensive examination. In order to successfully manage the intricacies of the digital age, it promotes educated discourse and cooperative efforts among stakeholders. The article aims to provide a fuller knowledge of the RTBF and its implications for people's autonomy and the larger digital society by clarifying its legal, ethical, and practical aspects.

2020

This dissertation aims to fill a gap in the debate surrounding art. 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), better known as ‘the right to be forgotten’: a clear view on the problems that this right can address when it comes to personal information presented to users on the Web. The study traces how several kinds of Web applications (‘basic’ web pages, social network sites, and search engines), as well as viral outbreaks, can give rise to problematic online portrayals of individuals. The conclusion of the problem analyses, is that there is not one problem. The (occasionally) ‘long-lasting memory’ of the Web is just one of the issues. A overarching perspective is presented by approaching the mediating technology as a ‘narrator’ of a materialised narrative identity of referents. The study looks into the how and what of the problems, their key elements, and gives handholds for a fine-tuned application of art. 17 GDPR in a manner that respects the various interests at stake. The presented framework can help to contextualise, and in some cases maybe even overcome, potential conflicts between the right to erasure and the other interests involved, most notably those protected under the right to freedom of expression and information.

In this article we argue that the European Union directive on "the right to be forgotten" is unrealistic and suggest instead a series of principles that can protect us from the potentially harmful publication of private information. The dissemination of personal information through public and private databases as well as social media is gradually educating humanity about reality: humans are weak; everyone misbehaves; and we need to learn to accept public knowledge of the imperfections of ourselves and others.

The Santa Clara Journal of International Law, 2017

The world has fully emerged into the digital age of the Internet, which rarely forgets. As a result of this transition, citizens around the globe have found their current lives and past becoming less private by the day. The European Court of Justice ("ECJ"), through a landmark ruling, created a new standard allowing European citizens to request a delinking of their name from specific links in results provided by search engines. This idea of a "right to be forgotten" has slowly begun to spread across the globe and this paper raises the question of whether it is a human right. While it is my conclusion in this paper that the "right to be forgotten" is a human right due to rights of privacy and reputation, it is an ongoing global discussion that is ever-evolving.