When it isn’t right to forget

When it isn’t right to forget

News:

1. Right to be Forgotten, a new right proposed by Justice B.N Srikrishna Committee under Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018.

What is Right to be Forgotten: The right to be forgotten leads to allowing individuals to have information, videos or photographs, articles etc. about themselves deleted from certain internet records so that they cannot be found by search engines.

Important News:

2. Incident raising need of Right to be Forgotten:

• Back in 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in favor of Spanish man, who was unhappy that searching his name on Google threw up a newspaper article about his bankruptcy a decade ago.
• The EU court in 2009 upheld his right, and said, reminding him of his unpleasant part of life is against the Justice.
• However, Google has raised the concern that ruling will invite flood of such applications and involve huge investments in setting up an automated system for tracking such requests.

3. In India, B.N. Srikrishna Committee has submitted Draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018 which has advocated for removal of very old, irrelevant and unnecessary information links from social media networks.

4. Report has laid significant emphasis on obtaining the consent of an individual to process and use personal data.

5. Draft Bill has listed out three scenarios in which an individual will have the right to be forgotten or right to restrict continuing disclosure of personal data, such as

• If data disclosure is no longer necessary.
• The consent to use data has been withdrawn.
• If data is being used contrary to the provisions of the law or for illegal purpose.

6. The bill has provided for appointment of Adjudicating officer to probe into the matter.

7. Factors needs to be considered by Adjudicating officer:

• The sensitivity of the personal data.
• The scale of disclosure and the degree of accessibility sought to be restricted or prevented
• The role of the data principal (to whom the data belongs to) in public life.
• The relevance of the personal data to the public.
• The nature of the disclosure and of the activities of the data fiduciary.

8. As far as the data protection and right to privacy is concerned the right to be forgotten sounds fine.

9. However, the Data Protection Bill is going to be a serious threat to press freedom and RTI.

10.Arguments against granting right to be forgotten.

• Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution did not provide “privacy” as a ground for imposing restrictions on right to information.
• Curtailing freedom of press/journalist/individuals to criticise the public personalities for their public policies.
• Journalist has to wait for the decision of the adjudicating officer to obtain any critical information.

11.Issues and challenges involved with Indian Draft:

• The draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2018, has a section on the Right to be Forgotten. But the proposed bill does not provide right to erasure (e.g. online link will be removed not actual data).
• In order to obtain the personal/private information, journalist has to prove the Privacy of the data and individual is taken care of and it is in the compliance with code of ethics.

12.Exemptions proposed against claiming rights:

• Right to be Forgotten will not apply to the processing of data in the interests of prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of any offence
• Rights of the data principal, including the right to be forgotten, are exempted if the purpose of data processing is in the interest of the security of state.
• On the similar grounds, a criminal cannot insist that his crime or conviction should not be shared with Media.

13.Europe Case Study:

• The EU has been pushing heavily for a new law on data privacy – of which “right to be forgotten” is a key component
• EU’s newest privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), forces companies around the world to follow EU rules if they want to do business in the bloc.