According to the GDPR, if an organisation has no legal basis for keeping your personal data you have the right to request that it be erased. If they have no legal basis for keeping it, then they ought to have erased it anyway. So this right ought to vanish in a puff of logic. But it hasn’t…
I’ve been reading about Slow Computing and the need for ‘digital forgetting’. But, unlike the GDPR Right to Erasure, human forgetting isn’t clean: more often involving uncertainty rather than simple elimination. That leaves our database in a different state: whereas digital erasure has no effect on the records that remain, much of our human memory […]
Yesterday’s excellent University of Cambridge conference on Internet Regulation After Google Spain suggested that data protection law will continue to affect a growing range of our activities, but that interpreting its requirements in novel circumstances will continue to be challenging. It was suggested that if the current (1995) European Directive was for the age of […]
In discussions of the “Right to be Forgotten” it is often observed that Google manages each month to deal with tens of millions of delisting requests for breach of copyright, as opposed to tens of thousands for inaccurate personal data. Often the implication seems to be that those numbers should be more similar. However it […]
Next month I’ll be going to an academic conference on Google Spain and the “Right to be Forgotten” (actually, “right to be delinked”) so I thought I’d better organise my thoughts on why, as a provider and user of communications and information services, the decision worries me. And I am much more worried by the […]
One aspect of the Google Spain judgment I’ve not seen discussed is the incentives it creates for search engines. The European Court of Justice found that under some circumstances Data Protection law entitles an individual to demand that out of date and inaccurate results be removed from the results of a search for their name […]
A number of people have asked me what the recent European Court judgment in the Google “right to be forgotten” case means; here’s why I have been answering that I don’t know! The case concerned a fifteen-year old article in a Spanish newspaper about a named individual who had got into financial difficulties. The individual, […]
ENISA’s study on the “Right to be Forgotten” contains useful reminders that once information is published on the Internet it may be impossible to completely remove it. Implementing a right to be forgotten would involve four stages: Identifying and locating the information to be removed; Tracking all copies that may have been made, including unauthorised […]