The right to forget/be forgotten: a nearly fundamental human right in the age of total recall technology

Abstract

This study attempts to conceptualise the right to forget/be forgotten along with building a theoretical foundation of this individual’s right and validating the social importance of establishing the right, which is characterised as a nearly fundamental human right to protect intellectual freedom and to ensure a spiritually affluent human life and human dignity. Here, forgetting is defined as an intellectual/mental state of a person where he/she doesn’t recall a fact that (has) happened in the past or information that he/she knew in the past and/or images, feelings and sensation related to the fact or the knowledge, or as cognitive function which causes such an intellectual state. Glorifying a past event or having erroneous human memory is a kind of forgetting.