A Child’s Right to be Forgotten: Letting Go of the Past and Embracing the Future?

Abstract

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation confirms the right of the data subject to have his or her personal data erased in its Article 17. Recital 65 GDPR clarifies that this right is particularly relevant where children have given their consent not being fully aware of the risks involved by the processing, and later want to remove personal data, especially on the Internet. Yet, the right to erasure is not absolute. When processing is necessary for a number of legitimate reasons, such as for the exercise of the right to freedom of expression and information, the right to erasure will not apply. This article seeks to explore the right to erasure from a dynamic child rights perspective, and aims to identify a number of challenging questions that may arise in practice, and that are related to the balance with other rights and interests, the required transparency, the potential to ask for erasure where others (for instance, parents) have shared information about the child or given consent on behalf of the child, the desirability of erasure-by-default systems, and enforcement by Data Protection Authorities.

Keywords

• Right to be forgotten
• right to erasure
• General Data Protection Regulation
• child
• children’s rights
• data protection