The Delhi High Court on Monday ruled that the “right to be forgotten” is an essential part of the fundamental right to privacy guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution and said people should not be forced to suffer permanent damage to their reputation and personal lives just because information about them remains searchable online.
The ruling came during the ruling on a group of petitions that sought to de-index, delink or remove online content, Bar & Bench reported. The petitioners said the right to privacy includes the “right to be forgotten.”
What did the court say?
Justice Sachin Datta said that in the digital age, privacy is not limited to keeping information secret. It also includes a person’s ability to control how their personal information is shared and accessed.
The Supreme Court said: “The right to be forgotten thus reflects the evolution of privacy in response to the permanence of online information. In a society where digital records cannot be physically erased, the ability to seek erasure ensures that informational self-determination remains effective. It protects individuals from permanent exposure to past events that may no longer be relevant, while preserving their dignity and autonomy in society.”
She noted that information privacy includes informational self-determination, giving individuals the power to determine what information is disseminated about them, who can access it, and what purpose it is used for.
She said that information that remains permanently available online can negatively impact a person’s job opportunities, career growth, social reputation, personal relationships, and public dignity.
While discussing the need to balance privacy rights with the principle of open justice, the court said that transparency in judicial proceedings does not require that individuals remain permanently identifiable through name-based Internet searches.
The court noted that when an acquittal is difficult to find in search results, while allegations, arrests or accusations continue to appear prominently online, such a situation cannot be treated as a feature of open justice.
HC says de-indexing and masking are constitutionally valid
The Court held that de-indexing and anonymization are constitutionally valid measures that help balance privacy rights and public access to court records. The Supreme Court said that de-indexing does not remove judicial information or records. Instead, it just prevents them from being easily located through name-based searches.
Likewise, concealment involves removing names and personal identifiers from publicly available digital records while keeping the original judicial records intact in court archives.
Justice Datta said the concealment does not amount to censorship and does not change the reasoning, conclusions or prior value of the judgements. Instead, it ensures that a person’s name does not become the primary search tool through which the public can easily access sensitive court records.
The Supreme Court also said that when a person has been acquitted, removed or acquitted by a court of competent jurisdiction, continuing to associate that person’s name with online allegations may cause undue harm to his dignity and reputation.
She said that the “shadow of crime” should not be allowed to replace the “shadow of dignity” after legal proceedings have exonerated an individual.
The court said that when de-indexing is justified, these directives can extend to all domains and versions of the search engine.
It added that a remedy that can be bypassed simply by switching to a different domain suffix cannot be considered an effective protection of the fundamental right to information privacy.
With inputs from ANI
