The right to be forgotten in the “global village” paradigm: on the issue of implementation

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

The advent of the information era in the history of mankind also caused a change in the paradigm of social relations, transforming their format, according to Marshall McLuhan's apt phrase, into a "global village". In this paradigm, the right to be forgotten becomes an important means of protecting a person from uncontrolled dissemination of unwanted information about him. The article reveals the nature of the right to be forgotten and its relationship with the phenomenon of privacy, analyzes the provisions of European legislation and practice. Attention is drawn to the fact that in Ukraine, despite the existing need to have this tool for the protection of personally sensitive information, no legislative algorithm for the effective implementation of the right in question has been developed. It is noted that, from a legal and technical point of view, the implementation of the right to be forgotten is quite difficult, since the recognition of the genetic connection of the state of being forgotten with the right to the inviolability of private life in the “global village” paradigm forces the law enforcer to always seek a reasonable balance between a person's desire to limit access to a certain information and other basic human rights and freedoms (freedom of expression, the right of users to access any form of information, etc.). Given the situation of legal uncertainty, the article concludes that there are two ways to close this gap. The first of them is to speed up work on the adoption of the new Law of Ukraine “On the Protection of Personal Data”, the provisions of which would be devoted, among other things, to practical issues of implementation and protection of the right to be forgotten; the second is to develop a separate regulatory legal act, fully devoted to the analyzed law. At the same time, when working out an appropriate mechanism for the effective implementation of the right to be forgotten, one should take into account those aspects that in practice lead to paradoxical situations in their content, such as: the mismatch of traditional physical borders with the borders of the “global village”, the Streisand effect, the disproportionality of the efforts and the achieved result, the conflict of the person's past with the possibility of their further socialization in society, etc.).