"Our data protection framework should incorporate much bigger issues than mere erasure of the data”

“There is nothing like a right that will be deleted forever from the face of this earth. It may be that on Facebook or any social media, you are off the feeds or certain records or from any public information from any agency that you requested to not publish it. So it is not that suddenly out of the blue everything is going to be erased. There is a erasure of data with respect to a context. Now this Right to be Forgotten has been given much hype and there have been a lot of deliberations on it abroad. In most of the cases, more than Right to be Forgotten, it is the issue of Right to recover data after the demise of a person. A large amount of data in today’s time is being stored by you in social media – moments, writings, photographs, everything. So the family members of the deceased try to recover this data since they are part of memories. It is upon us whether the access of the account of a person who is not alive is actually seen as an authorized or an unauthorized. This may not have made much of a difference some 4-5 years back because we never used to post so much about our lives on Facebook. But today every aspect of our life is being shared on Facebook. So these are all priceless memories. So you try to hack into their account to get back those memories which is an offence in the eyes of law. So I think that is a bigger issue than mere erasure that our data protection framework is not interested in.”

Puneet Bhasin
Cyber law expert