Data Privacy and the Right to Be Forgotten in 2025: A Global Legal Dilemma

In today’s fast-moving digital world, our personal data is more than just numbers stored somewhere in cyberspace — it’s our identity, our story, our truth. The right to be forgotten has turned into a worldwide legal talking point, where people and courts are trying to balance privacy with the public’s right to know. Since 2014, when that famous Google Spain judgment happened in Europe, this right started gaining momentum, and honestly, the debate hasn’t slowed down. The EU put it in black and white through GDPR, the UK kept similar protections even after Brexit, India brought its Digital Personal Data Protection Act in 2023, and the US, well, they’re still figuring it out, with patchy privacy laws that vary from one state to another — typical, na?

The charm of this right is easy to understand. Imagine somebody’s youthful folly, a mistake made on a social media post or some dated court case, haunting them every time somebody does a Google search. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the gent who actually created the World Wide Web, said in a 2024 lecture that this right is “an effort to bring humanity back into the digital world.” That hits home, doesn’t it? People deserve second chances, especially in this online world where nothing ever gets fully deleted — not from Facebook, not from Insta, not even from some obscure blog you wrote during college days.

But as they say in India, every coin has two sides, and honestly, the right to be forgotten comes with its own fair share of problems, some of them pretty serious. One big worry is how easily it can be used like a tool for censorship. David Anderson KC, a top barrister from London, pointed out at an Oxford data law event that this could be “a right to rewrite history” if not applied carefully. That sounds about right, no? Imagine a powerful neta or big-shot CEO trying to hide genuine news stories or public records that actually matter. It would be like trying to erase the ink from the pages of history — unfair to society, to journalists, and to all of us.

And then there’s the technical angle. As any software engineer in Bangalore or Silicon Valley will tell you, once data is out there, bhai, it’s out there. It gets copied, cached, mirrored all over the internet. Ravi Srinivasan, speaking at a cyber law forum in Delhi, nailed it: “True erasure is close to impossible; this right gives a false sense of control.” Aap sochiye — even if Google or Bing removes a link, the original page can still sit quietly on some server in another country or show up in web archives. That’s the harsh truth.

What complicates things further is how the right to be forgotten plays out differently across the globe. So maybe you get your record wiped in Europe or Delhi, but somebody in New York or Sydney can still find it in two clicks. It’s like cleaning your side of the house while the neighbour’s is still messy — confusing, inconsistent, and not always useful. The tech companies are stuck in the middle, trying to obey laws that often pull them in different directions. Honestly, it's a legal jigsaw puzzle.

There’s also a worry that too much focus on deleting data could mess with creativity, research, and even democracy. Some historians in London and academics at American universities are already saying they need access to archives to tell society’s true story. The Electronic Frontier Foundation in the US warned last year that if we keep deleting data like this, it could harm the datasets needed to train AI systems properly — and with AI everywhere from chatbots to your city’s CCTV, that’s not something to ignore.

As of now, courts and lawmakers in all these regions are still trying to figure out how to strike the right balance. Europe’s new AI rules even mention the right to be forgotten in relation to automated decisions, which shows just how tangled these issues are getting. In India, the Supreme Court will probably give some landmark ruling soon to explain how this right fits with the fundamental right to privacy declared in the Puttaswamy case. And in the US, states like New York have tried bringing in similar laws, but free speech concerns have slowed things down.

In the end, this right shows us how privacy, free speech, fairness, and technology are all tied together like threads in a vast global tapestry. For some, this right is a shield, a way to reclaim dignity in a world that never forgets. For others, it’s a slippery slope towards censorship and revisionist history. As Tim Berners-Lee wisely said, “A right poorly applied will fracture trust in both technology and law.” So, whether you’re reading this in Delhi, Dallas, or Dundee, the debate about the right to be forgotten is really a debate about what kind of future we want in this digital age — one that remembers everything, or one that learns when to let go.