Abstract
The right to be forgotten emerged from humanity’s age-old desire to control personal narrative and find redemption. While digital technologies have dramatically amplified the need for such protections, the concept’s roots extend deep into pre-digital society. This research traces the evolution of forgetting as a legal right, demonstrating how this concept transformed from philosophical ideal to enforceable legal principle.
Early incarnations appeared in French and Italian legal traditions through “le droit à l’oubli” and “dirittoall’oblio,” which initially allowed rehabilitated criminals to escape perpetual association with past misdeeds. These principles recognized that human dignity requires the possibility of renewal and reintegration. Simultaneously, various European legal systems developed privacy protections that would later form the conceptual foundation for digital-era forgetting rights.
The digital revolution fundamentally altered the dynamics of personal information, creating what Viktor Mayer-Schönberger termed “perfect digital memory.” As our lives became increasingly documented online, the asymmetry between human forgetting and digital remembering created unprecedented challenges to privacy, identity formation, and personal autonomy.
Global responses have varied dramatically, reflecting different cultural and legal traditions. While many jurisdictions have adopted similar principles, notable resistance has emerged in the United States, where First Amendment concerns compete with privacy interests. This tension highlights how the right to be forgotten exists at the intersection of competing values: privacy, freedom of expression, public interest, and historical truth.
Today’s implementation challenges reflect this complex heritage. Courts and data protection authorities struggle to develop coherent standards for balancing these interests, while technical limitations complicate practical enforcement. Nevertheless, the right’s continued development represents an important human attempt to preserve autonomy in digital environments that naturally prioritize perfect memory over the human value of forgetting.
This historical perspective illuminates not just legal development but a profound ethical negotiation about memory, forgetting, and what it means to be human in increasingly digital societies.
Introduction: The Human Dimension of Digital Memory
In a small apartment in Madrid, Mario Costeja González sits at his kitchen table in 2010, frustrated as he stares at his computer screen. Years earlier, he had faced financial difficulties that led to the forced sale of his property—a temporary setback he had long since overcome. Yet when potential clients searched his name online, the first result was still a newspaper announcement from 1998 about that property auction. His present reality—his successful career, his financial stability—was being overshadowed by a digital ghost from his past that refused to fade away.
“It was as if someone was standing outside my office every day with a sign announcing my old debts,” González would later explain. “The internet had turned a temporary problem into a permanent stigma.”[1]
González’s personal struggle would ultimately lead to one of the most consequential legal decisions in digital privacy history, but his experience reflects a profoundly human challenge: how to live, grow, and evolve in a world where digital memory is perfect and unforgiving.
The story of the right to be forgotten is not merely a legal or technological narrative—it is fundamentally about humanity’s relationship with memory, identity, and the opportunity for personal reinvention. It represents the collision between ancient human wisdom about forgiveness and redemption and the unforgiving permanence of the digital record.
This research traces the historical development of the right to be forgotten, from its philosophical underpinnings through its legal evolution to its current implementation across global jurisdictions, with particular attention to how it addresses this essential human need to control one’s narrative in the digital age.
[1] Statement attributed to González in Zuiderveen Borgesius, F. (2016). The right to be forgotten: Europe’s cutting edge privacy protection. Privacy Law Scholars Conference, p. 23.