The Digital Era 3

7The Right to be Forgotten

Anticipating Convention 108 of the Council of Europe, signed in Strasbourg on January 28, 1981, Article 3 of the French Act of January 6, 1978, “relating to information technology and civil liberties”, granted any person “the right to know and to contest the information and reasoning used in the computerized processing”¹ that concerns them. Thus, for more than 40 years, any individual on file in France has been able to find out what is recorded about them or their account (with certain restrictions, however. See Article 35 of the 1978 French Act on data processing and liberties). This right of access applies almost everywhere in the European Union. However, it would have little effect if the law did not also require the “data controller” to rectify any errors or inaccuracies that their records may contain. This is why Article 36 of the French Act (and similar foreign texts) allows the holder of the right of access “to demand that information [...] which is inaccurate, incomplete, ambiguous, out of date, etc., be rectified, completed, clarified, updated or deleted”. This subject’s personal right is combined with a right of rectification, which is its corollary and the primary means of its enforcement.

For a quarter of a century, these two positive rights have made it possible to improve the accuracy of personal data. Sometimes, the data subject has gone further than the law intended: some have not only demanded to rectify inaccurate or outdated data ...