Last week, the Delhi High Court passed an important judgment in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India. Justice Sachin Datta held that the right to privacy under Article 21 extends to the right to be forgotten. The relief granted to the petitioners asked search engines like Google and service providers like Indian Kanoon to delist names from judgments and orders and to disable name-based searches. The judgment aims to retain the public nature of the records and to discourage access to them through name-based searches.
This is a reasonable ask. The European equivalent of this is Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), under the right to erasure. The moral argument is simple and intuitive. Humans forget when machines do not. A person is entitled to some distance from their worst day. This is the right to be left alone, restated for a medium that has abolished the natural decay of memory. Nobody needs to be reminded ad nauseam of an arrest that ended in acquittal, a complaint that ended in a closure report, or a marriage that ended in court. A person mentioned incidentally in litigation should not spend the rest of their life explaining a case that was never really about them. Internet prevents this forgetting. On that normative question, the courts’ views echo common sense. They also acknowledge the importance of open justice. Records are to remain open and searchable for public interest. For instance, an offender against women or children gets no clean slate, because the public interest in that information does not fade with time and exists to protect other people. Likewise, a person convicted of a breach of public trust or an elected representative faces heightened and continuous scrutiny under the logic of public accountability. The courts sorted cases by their public relevance, so that a criminal conviction may legitimately surface on a name search while a matrimonial dispute may not, and it allowed masking of private and sensitive matters on application. The rule against de-indexing aims to deter only easy aggregation.
