RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN- Is this the right time to include in our Indian constitution as a fundamental right? Vishu Raj LAW CRITIQUE Sat, Nov 28, 2020, at ,11:32 PM The right to be forgotten is the right to have private information about a person is removed from Internet searches and other directories under some circumstances. The concept has been discussed and put into practice in both the European Union (EU) and in Argentina since 2006. There has been controversy about the practicality of establishing a right to be forgotten (in respect to access to information) as an international human right. The right to be forgotten derives from the case Google Spain SL, Google Inc vs. Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Mario Costeja González (2014). For the first time, the right to be forgotten is codified and to be found in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in addition to the right to erasure. In January 2012, the European Commission circulated the final draft of a General Data Protection Regulation, in which a new concept was introduced: the right to be forgotten. It stipulated that natural persons would obtain the right to have publicly available personal data erased and not further disseminated when they were no longer necessary in relation to the purposes for which they were collected (article 17) (European Commission 2012). According to the European Commission, this right would help people better manage data protection risks online by enabling them to delete their data if there were no legitimate grounds for retaining them. The draft Regulation also elucidated, however, that such protection had to be reconciled with the right to free expression What is the right to be forgotten? The right to be forgotten appears in Recitals 65 and 66 and in Article 17 of the GDPR It states, “The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller the erasure of personal data concerning him or her without undue delay and the controller shall have the obligation to erase personal data without undue delay” if one of a number of conditions applies. “Undue delay” is considered to be about a month. You must also take reasonable steps to verify the person requesting erasure is actually the data subject. The right to be forgotten dovetails with people’s right to access their personal information in Article 15 The right to control one’s data is meaningless if people cannot take action when they no longer consent to process when there are significant errors within the data, or if they believe information is being stored unnecessarily. Personal Data Bill Protection Act 2019 In July 2017, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology set up a committee to study issues related to data protection. The committee was chaired by retired Supreme Court judge Justice B. N. Srikrishna. The Bill aims to provide for the protection of the privacy of individuals relating to their personal data, specify the flow and usage of personal data, create a relationship of trust between persons and entities processing the personal data, protect the fundamental rights of individuals whose personal data are processed, to create a framework for organizational and technical measures in the processing of data, laying down norms for social media intermediary, cross-border transfer, accountability of entities processing personal data, remedies for unauthorized and harmful processing, and to establish a Data Protection Authority of India for the said purposes and for matters connected there with or incidental thereto. 'Right to be forgotten' under the India Law- Justice BN Srikrishna Committee’s draft Personal Data Protection Bill 2018, has introduced a new right called the right to be forgotten, which refers to the ability of an individual to limit, delink, delete, or correct the disclosure of the personal information on the internet that is misleading, embarrassing, or irrelevant. According to Section 27 of the Bill, a data principal has a right to prevent the data fiduciary from using such data or information if data disclosure is no longer necessary, the consent to use data has been withdrawn or if data is being used contrary to the provisions of the law. Further, section 27(2) says the adjudicating officer (Data Protection Authority) can decide on the question of disclosure, and the circumstances in which he thinks such disclosure can override the freedom of speech and the citizen’s right to information. Right to be forgotten is in sync with the right to privacy, which was hailed by the Supreme Court as an integral part of Article 21 (right to life) of the constitution in K.S.Puttaswamy judgement of 2017. Observation by India Constitutional Court:- For the first time, Orissa High Court an Indian constitutional court brought to the fore the issue of an individual's right to be forgotten online, advocating for the enforcement of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution relating to Right to Life and Personal Liberty as a remedy to victims whose compromising information was available online. Denying bail to an accused of allegedly posting sexually explicit content of a female friend without her consent, Justice SK Panigrahi observed that, despite the accused deleting the obscene material, there was no legal mechanism available to the victim to have the content permanently removed from the server of the host platform (social media site) or the web. “It is also an undeniable fact that the implementation of the 'Right to be Forgotten' is a thorny issue in terms of practicality and technological nuances.