By Prof. Naomi Klineberg
Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation enshrined an unusual concept into law: the “right to be forgotten.” Citizens may petition for certain records—search results, past infractions, even images—to be removed from digital visibility. In an age where the internet never forgets, the promise of erasure feels like a form of justice.
But every act of forgetting is also an act of memory management. To delete is not merely to protect; it is to reshape the collective archive. And here lies the tension: when does the individual’s right to obscurity conflict with society’s duty to remember?
Whose Interests Does Memory Serve?
Consider the example of a young man convicted of petty theft decades ago. Should that conviction still appear on the first page of search results when his name is typed? Many would argue no: a minor mistake ought not to shadow a lifetime. Yet, if the theft involved abuse of trust in a professional setting, does the public not have a legitimate interest in retaining access to that history?
The Socratic question becomes: is digital forgetting a restoration of dignity, or a concealment of truth?
Memory as Justice, Memory as Punishment
Philosophers from Aristotle to Arendt have wrestled with the dual nature of memory. It can uphold justice by preserving testimony of harm. It can also perpetuate punishment long after formal penalties are served. Digital archives, indifferent to time, collapse this distinction. The past is always equally present, searchable at will.
Should we, then, develop norms of “temporal justice”—rules about how long certain memories should remain public before they yield to forgiveness? Or does legislating remembrance risk distorting history itself?
Collective Memory and Collective Amnesia
At the societal level, the stakes grow sharper. Nations, too, grapple with the desire to forget. Calls to remove monuments or suppress archives are often met with the counter-claim that history, however painful, must be confronted, not erased. Yet individuals ask of the digital commons what states often deny: selective amnesia.
Here lies another question: if we grant individuals the right to digital erasure, can we consistently deny communities the same right to purge uncomfortable histories? Or are we obliged to distinguish between private dignity and public accountability?
Technology as Arbiter
The mechanisms of forgetting are not neutral. Search engines decide which removals to honor, courts weigh whose privacy outweighs whose curiosity, algorithms determine what remains visible. In effect, we have delegated the ethics of memory to technical and bureaucratic systems. But can a search index truly balance the moral weight of dignity against the imperatives of history?
A Question Rather Than a Conclusion
Perhaps the most honest stance is to admit that neither absolute memory nor absolute forgetting is desirable. An unrelenting archive punishes beyond measure; a sweeping erasure endangers the record on which justice depends.
So the central question remains: what kind of forgetting is consistent with justice? And what kind of remembering is necessary for truth?
Between these poles lies the space we must inhabit—contested, uncomfortable, but unavoidable.
