Internet Search – Right to be forgotten & Privacy in Digital Age
The right to be forgotten, understood as subsuming the right of an individual to seek removal or restriction of personal information from public digital accessibility, where such information is no longer relevant or serves no legitimate public purpose, flows naturally and necessarily from the constitutional recognition of informational privacy under Article 21.
the right to delisting is the right of individuals to request search engines to de-link web pages containing personal information about them, where the information is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive for the purposes of the data processing
Landmark Judgment of 144 pages on Right to Privacy in Digital Age
Disclosure of the identity of the parties in the public domain, particularly on conducting an internet search, has subjected them to social stigma, loss of dignity, psychological trauma, harassment and defamation.
Judgment dated 29.5.2026 of the High Court of Delhi in Writ Petition (Civil) No.1021 of 2016 of Laksh Vir Singh Yadav Vs. Union of India and others with 29 writ petitions.
Right to be forgotten: HC lets personal info be masked in judicial records
The principle of “Open Justice” & Limitations in the Digital Age
A judgment that previously reposed in the Court records, accessible only to the diligent searcher, is now instantly retrievable by any person who enters a ‘party name’ into a search engine.
The recognition of the “right to be forgotten” inevitably brings into focus the questions revolving around the interplay between the individual’s ‘right to privacy’ and the public’s ‘right to information’ or the ‘right to know’. While privacy safeguards informational autonomy, the ‘right to know’ ensures transparency, accountability and the free flow of information.
It cannot be characterized as an ingredient of ‘open justice’. It is, in essence, a qualitative transformation that a commercial search engine effects upon the ‘information’. This is brought about by ‘aggregating, ranking, and serving’ in direct response to, and to ‘satisfy’ a name-based query
Google is an active processor of personal data, which materially contributes to the invasion of informational privacy. The same has also been traced by the European Court of Human Rights, in the judgment rendered in Hurbain v. Belgium (Grand Chamber, Application No. 57292/16):
- As held in Google Spain S.L. (supra), the activities of Google cannot be equated with those of the “publishers of websites”. The observations made in this regard are as under: “35 In this connection, it should be pointed out that the processing of personal data carried out in the context of the activity of a search engine can be distinguished from and is additional to that carried out by publishers of websites, consisting in loading those data on an internet page.”
- It follows that Google’s indexing and serving of judicial and other records in response to name-based searches is not an exercise of any fundamental right that can be legitimately pitted against the petitioner’s fundamental right to informational privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution. Such search engines are not ‘passive channels of information’, instead they are in the nature of a ‘commercial platform’, deriving revenue by leveraging user searches and associating them with advertising opportunities.
- The concepts of de-indexing and masking emerge as the appropriate modalities through which this balance is to be given practical effect. As explained in Hurbain v. Belgium (Grand Chamber, European Court of Human Rights, Application No. 57292/16), the minimal, appropriate measure is not erasure of the article which remained preserved in the archives, but its de-indexing from search engines so as to moderate accessibility. The record is preserved; the unlimited and indiscriminate name-based searchability is what is moderated.
- A search on a person’s name in conjunction with the terms such as ‘arrested’, ‘accused’, ‘case’, or ‘court’, returns results that are ranked by engagement and not by accuracy or completeness. The algorithm that determines this ranking is not a function of ‘open justice’, but is designed to maximize commercial interest. De-indexing moderates the harm to some extent in as much as it removes the specific URL from ‘name-based result.’ Such relief is liable be granted in a deserving case. The same principle applies to video content hosted on platforms such as ‘YouTube’ which is detrimental to certain of the petitioners. Such content, when it surfaces in response to a name-based search, causes the identical harm that de-indexing is designed to address viz. the disproportionate and indiscriminate amplification of damaging material in response to a search.
- Unless otherwise specified, all aforesaid directions shall be complied with within two weeks from today. Where relief has been granted, Google LLC/ Google Inc./Google India Private Ltd. and all other search engine operators are directed to de-index the relevant content, orders, judgments and associated reportage from name-based search results, and shall be complied in the same manner, as a direction under Rule 3(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021.
285. Indian Kanoon (iKanoon Software Development Private Limited) is directed to restrict name-based search functionality within its platform in respect of the records of the petitioners identified above. The judgments and orders shall remain accessible on Indian Kanoon by case number, citation, Court details and date.
