Written in April 2013, in response to ‘The Right to Be Forgotten,’ Foreign Policy, April 5, 2013.
What do you think? Should there be a “right to be forgotten”?
While this may sound right if you think of pranks done by teenagers who don’t want to be reminded of them when they apply for a job years later, would this “forgetting” also apply to crimes, human rights abuses etc?
Perhaps a “fading into history” function would be preferable, allowing for past activities to no longer show up in the usual search results, but giving researchers and reporters access to the past.
Postscript May 26. 2026:
The ECJ ruled in May 2014, establishing the right to be forgotten as European law. The GDPR in Article 17 later codified it. The debate has now extended to AI and its uses: whether the right to be forgotten applies to AI training data and model weights remains unresolved, and the “fading into history” question turns out to be harder than most people may have anticipated.
