While our life continues to change with the ebb and flow of time, each of us finds meaning in new and different ways, with some aspects of our identities being forgotten—much like dust in the wind. Friedrich Nietzsche, in his seminal work ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’, emphasised the importance of forgetting as a fundamental component for achieving a fulfilling and meaningful life. He observed that “a person who did not possess the power of forgetting at all…would be condemned to see everywhere a coming into being. Such a person no longer believes in his own being, no longer believes in himself…He will, like the true pupil of Heraclitus, finally hardly dare any more to lift his finger.”
He believed that forgetting was more than just the act of getting rid of something; it was an important way for people to move on from past transgressions, making room for new opportunities. Nietzsche subscribed to the belief that a person who fails to forget is like a sheep that eats, rests and digests without knowing what yesterday or today is. After all, a man without the ability to forget, as Ireneo Funes from Jorge Luis Borges’s short story Funes the Memorious would remind us, is one who lives the past continuously and never the present, incapable of generalities and abstraction, destined to live an intolerable existence.
From this perspective, knowing that everything you do and say is stored forever in the digital realm makes the ability to forget a liberating endeavour. It gives people the power to take back control of their stories and get rid of the digital clutter that might limit them.
The internet, however, has a long memory. No matter how much time has passed, information once locked away in old cabinets or on rotting newspapers are now accessed with a few keystrokes. In this time of widespread data collection and surveillance capitalism, the idea that individuals should have the power to anonymise and remove personal information about them seems like a fantasy. Notably, the complaints of the internet’s infallible memory are more a reflection of the fear of its ability to retrieve than a concern about its capability to store vast amounts of data.
Curiously, it has also led to the growth and development of new social practices that further infringe upon an individual’s ability to forget. With the invention of the searchable internet and the empowerment of everyone to access information about individuals, it is now reasonable to state that one may not be able to form any new interpersonal relationship without his past coming in as an arbiter. In light of this, it is important that we deal with issues related to human freedom, identity, and what remembering really means in this digital age.
Privacy fundamentally relates to personal autonomy—the ability to control our personal information and make decisions free from unwarranted interference. It can be viewed as an expression of an individual’s right to personal immunity, specifically the ability to determine one’s own identity, thoughts, and actions. As the Supreme Court observed in the Justice K S Puttaswamy case, “[e]very individual is entitled to perform his actions in private. In other words, she is entitled to be in a state of repose and to work without being disturbed, or otherwise observed or spied upon”.
This right is universally recognised in constitutional frameworks. While we have instituted laws that protect certain privacy rights in sensitive personal data in the form of the Information Technology Act and the yet-to-be-enforced Digital Personal Data Protection Act, these are fairly general and do not confront the trauma and horrors associated with being overwhelmed by ‘abundant’ and easily available information.
Each interaction we have with the internet results in the generation of valuable data, which can be utilised by various entities, both governmental and non-governmental, to monitor our preferences, decisions and behaviour.
The right to be forgotten essentially serves as a legal tool that enables individuals to seek the removal of personal data from the internet. It also represents an increasing acknowledgement of the necessity to harmonise the advantages of information accessibility with the safeguarding of personal autonomy and dignity. However, underneath this right is the deeper philosophical inquiry that we dealt with regarding the essence of memory and the inherent human desire to forget.
This, however, does not mean everything an individual chooses to forget should be forgotten by society. Perhaps in the case of criminal records, there are some crimes, even if committed by juveniles, that should never be forgotten. Such unforgiveness requires remembering based on the contextual integrity of particular situations, that is, the norms of appropriateness that dictate the extent of information to be revealed in the context of a situation.
The Supreme Court has been tasked with deciding if the citizens of this nation have the right to be forgotten in the context of a petition moved by an accused who has sought to have judgements containing names removed from public domain. What should be remembered is that the court’s decision would have a significant impact on one of the most vital moral quandaries of the internet age: what do we owe to the past, and what does the past owe us?
(Views are personal)
(saaisudharsans@gmail.com)
Saai Sudharsan Sathiyamoorthy | Advocate, Madras High Court