Introduction: Interrogating the Right to be Forgotten

Abstract

The history of the future is now written in bytes. Current and emerging information technologies are mediating and shaping the narratives we build both about ourselves as individuals and ourselves as a collective. These will eventually constitute our future memories. The diffusion of Internet-based technologies has been changing the approach that people take to accessing information, managing their data, constructing a self, establishing relationships, constructing knowledge, relating to world events, reflecting upon past events, imagining the future, and so on. To upload and retrieve information (data) on the ‘web’ has become a quotidian automatic, often automated, operation. In particular, the ease with which personal data can be disclosed and private matters exposed in public has changed people’s ideas of ‘public space’ and of ‘private space’ as well as privacy. First computers and the Internet, then mobile devices and soon any mundane object or space (Internet of Things) have all been unnoticeably blurring or even hybridising these spaces. Perhaps following the enthusiasm for the connectivity hype that heralds ‘sharing’ as a good thing, many people are now demanding the ownership and control of their data across all processing phases, including the erasure of their presence on the web.

The authors work for the European Commission — Joint Research Centre (Ispra, Italy). The opinions they express in this chapter cannot in any circumstance be taken as official positions of the European Commission.