Balancing Digital Privacy and Freedom of Information: The Right to Be Forgotten Across Three Jurisdictions
Keywords:
freedom of expression, informational privacy, open justice, right to be forgottenAbstract
Digital search makes accurate but outdated personal information persistently accessible, creating tension between informational privacy and interests protected by freedom of expression, access to information, and open justice. This article compares the law governing the right to be forgotten in the European Union, the United States, and India through a qualitative doctrinal analysis of legislation, regulatory materials, and leading judgments available through 19 July 2026. The comparison identifies three models. European Union law recognises qualified erasure and de-referencing subject to safeguards for expression, journalism, archives, research, legal claims, and continuing public interest. United States law generally protects truthful, lawfully obtained public-record information, while sectoral and state consumer laws provide narrower deletion rights. India recognises informational privacy constitutionally, but its statutory erasure right was not yet in force at the study’s cut-off and the Supreme Court had not finally settled the treatment of online judicial records. The Delhi High Court’s 2026 distinction among preservation, masking, and name-based de-indexing offers a less restrictive remedial framework, although its authority remains subject to appellate clarification. The article proposes a remedy ladder and a structured proportionality test for Indian courts, designed to preserve authoritative judicial records while reducing disproportionate name-based exposure.
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Data Availability Statement
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new empirical datasets were generated or analyzed during the current study. All primary legal sources, including judicial decisions, constitutional texts, and statutory frameworks from the European Union, the United States, and India, are publicly available through official government gazettes, court registries, and standard legal databases.
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