On The Right To Be Forgotten

The earliest form of the right to be forgotten can be traced back to the right of oblivion enjoyed by French criminals in the 1970 s.It gave offenders who had served their sentences and returned to normal life the right to object to the fact that they had committed crimes and were imprisoned.The right to be forgotten in the modern sense is gradually formed in the EU’s personal information protection legislation process.The General Data Protection Regulation(Draft)promulgated by the European Union in 2012 clearly proposed the right to be forgotten.In 2014,the European Court of Justice made a historic judgment in support of the right to be forgotten in the case of Google v.Gonzales,thus formally establishing the right to be forgotten at the judicial level through jurisprudence.In this context,the right to be forgotten has gradually formed a unique connotation,which refers to the right of the information subject to permanent deletion by the information controller for information that has been published on the network about its own inappropriate,outdated,and continued to retain information that will have a negative impact on it.The right to be forgotten as a new right,the interpretation of its right attribute is a basic and prerequisite work on the research of the right to be forgotten.Analyzing from different dimensions,the right to be forgotten mainly has the attributes of basic human rights,personality,and absolute right.In the era of big data,information has become an important resource,which restricts the development of individuals and society.The right to be forgotten should become a new content of human rights,so as to better safeguard human survival,development and progress.In addition,in the era of big data,personalities affecting personal image and social evaluation are formed with the help of informational data.The right to be forgotten can restore the damaged personality image,so the right to be forgotten has the attribute of personality right.The obligatory subject of the right to be forgotten is not specific,so the right to be forgotten also has the attribute of absolute right.A major focus of academic controversy is whether the right to be forgotten has the right to privacy or the right to personal information.In fact,the right to privacy and the right to be forgotten are two completely different rights.It is more appropriate to study the attributes of the right to be forgotten in the framework of the right to personal information.By studying the connotation and attributes of the right to be forgotten,the question of what right is the right to be forgotten is solved.So why can the right to be forgotten be a right? The rise of a new claim to a right must necessarily have a certain legitimacy basis,and the right to be forgotten is the legitimacy basis of the right generation.This legitimacy is mainly reflected in the fact that the generation of the right to be forgotten has inherent ethical value and external social foundation,and can meet the needs of society.From the perspective of internal ethical values,the right to be forgotten is conducive to the protection of personal development,the maintenance of information self-determination,and the protection of human dignity.From the perspective of external social foundations,people have formed a social consensus that they want to be forgotten,and the existing legal norms cannot meet people’s hope.At the same time,the protection of the right to be forgotten does not have to pay too much price and cost.For these reasons,the right to be forgotten should be generated as a right.The right to be forgotten has a legitimate basis for generating rights,and the European Union,Russia and other countries have formally established it as a legal right through legislation.What kind of attitude should China take to protect the right to be forgotten? Because the right to be forgotten is of great value to personal development,information self-determination,and the maintenance of personal dignity,China should incorporate the right to be forgotten into legislation to protect it,which is in line with the era of big data.At the same time,the protection of the right to be forgotten in our country has a certain realistic basis,mainly reflected in the following aspects: first,the legislative basis,the current laws and regulations of our country have similar provisions of the right to be forgotten;second,the judicial practice basis,the first case of the right to be forgotten in the judicial trial in our country;third,the social basis,the Internet enterprises in our country have made certain responses and preparations for the personal information deletion needs of citizens.However,there may also be some obstacles to the protection of the right to be forgotten in our country,such as the lack of understanding of the right to be forgotten,and the low-level characteristics of the protection of civil rights in China.These obstacles should be actively overcome in the course of the realization of the right to be forgotten in our country to ensure that the right to be forgotten is finally promoted in our country.There are two main choices about the legal path for the protection of the right to be forgotten in our country.One is to protect the right to be forgotten into the law of tort liability,and the other is to protect the right to be forgotten into the personal information protection law.It is more appropriate to include the right to be forgotten when the Personal Information Protection Law is introduced in the future.