What is the right to be forgotten? | Explained
The story so far The Delhi High Court, in its recent ruling, has laid down the principles governing the right to be forgotten. The court
The story so far The Delhi High Court, in its recent ruling, has laid down the principles governing the right to be forgotten. The court has evolved a new jurisprudence to protect the privacy of those who continue to be victimised on account of their digital footprints on social media and elsewhere, despite having those matters settled in their favour. What is the ‘right to be forgotten’? The “right to be forgotten” is the right to have information erased or de-indexed from the public digital environment when its continued accessibility is harmful and serves no public interest. The concept came to the fore in 2014, when a Spanish citizen, Mario Costeja González, complained to the European Court of Justice that Google continued to display an old newspaper notice about the auction of his repossessed house even though the debt had been settled. The court ruled in his favour, laying the groundwork for the right to erasure, which was later incorporated into Article 17 of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). How has the idea of the right to be forgotten evolved in Indian law? The Supreme Court’s judgment in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) held that privacy is a fundamental right under Article 21, including the right to informational privacy.
In the years that followed, however, High Courts adopted divergent approaches. While some permitted anonymisation in limited cases, such as the Delhi High Court ordering the masking of names in certain matrimonial and criminal matters, others rejected similar requests on grounds of open justice. The real challenge was the lack of a coherent framework to balance these competing interests, which the May 2026 Delhi High Court judgment sought to address. What did the Delhi High Court decide? On May 29, the Delhi High Court ruled in a batch of over 30 consolidated petitions, led by Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India. The core issue was whether informational privacy could justify the de-indexing or masking of judicial records in a system committed to open justice. The court held that the right to be forgotten flows from Article 21’s guarantee of dignity and informational privacy. The structured proportionality test is that retention must have a legitimate purpose, that the harm to privacy must be balanced against the public interest, and that the least intrusive means, typically by masking names instead of deleting the entire judgment, should be preferred. The court also prescribed a two-week deadline for legal databases to comply and explained that only the parties’ names should be redacted, not the facts of the case.
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