“It’s dangerous when people are willing to give up their privacy”
The privacy advocates won their battle when the right to privacy received an elevation from a human right to a constitutionally protected fundamental right. This recognition of privacy as a fundamental right opened up a plethora of deliberations such as State’s power of surveillance, protection of personal data and so on. The overarching presence of technology led to privacy, as a concept, being exploited in various ways. One such way is the creation of a new right, associated with privacy concerns in the digital era, that is, the right to be forgotten. This paper is an attempt to place this right, a creation of Western jurisprudence (this right emanating from the landmark Google judgment), in the Indian context by analysing the efficacy of the deemed data protection law in protecting the said right. The researcher attempts here to gauge the judicial response to this alien right to be forgotten and its status in India. The paper also discusses the possible conundrums of this right with other protected rights such as that of expression and information. Furthermore, the changing contours of the right to privacy would also be dealt with by this paper in an effort at making the study comprehensive.
