Delhi High Court Right To Be Forgotten Google Indian Kanoon De Indexing

Disposing of a batch of petitions seeking to enforce individuals right to be forgotten, the Delhi High Court Friday directed search engine operators and legal database platforms such as Indian Kanoon to de-index name-based search functionality with respect to... Disposing of a batch of petitions seeking to enforce individuals’ right to be forgotten, the Delhi High Court Friday directed search engine operators and legal database platforms such as Indian Kanoon to de-index name-based search functionality with respect to judgments, orders, or news articles. It also directed Indian Kanoon to restrict name-based search functionality within its platform with respect to records of petitioners who were before the Delhi HC, while making it clear that the “judgments and orders shall remain accessible on Indian Kanoon by case number, citation, Court details and date”. Directing compliance with the direction within two weeks, the HC held, “No law authorises Google or any search engine to perpetually index and surface judicial records in a manner that overrides the individual’s fundamental right to informational privacy.” De-indexing does not remove or delete a court judgment from public records. It simply prevents a person’s name from appearing as a search result, making the judgment harder to find through a name-based internet search while keeping it accessible through case details or citations. The court disposed of nearly 38 petitions, with the oldest dating back to 2016. The petitioners included persons who have been acquitted of criminal charges or were parties to purely private civil or matrimonial disputes or persons whose names appear incidentally in judicial records of proceedings to which they were not parties. The petitioners had contended that the continued availability and name-based searchability of judicial records bearing their names in the digital public domain, such as in legal databases like ‘Indian Kanoon’, causes disproportionate and continuing harm to their reputations, dignity, and life prospects, excessive to any legitimate public interest served by such continued accessibility. Justice Sachin Datta observed, “The right to be forgotten thus reflects the evolution of privacy in response to the permanence of online information. In a society where digital records are virtually indelible, the ability to seek erasure ensures that informational self-determination remains effective. It protects individuals from perpetual exposure to past events that may no longer bear relevance, while preserving their dignity and autonomy in society.” In the absence of a comprehensive statutory framework to govern the right to be forgotten, and while noting that court records are anyway accessible otherwise, the court held, “… a private individual’s name functions as a permanent and unlimited retrieval key through a commercial search engine, enabling any casual internet user to instantly access the entirety of an individual’s engagement with legal/ judicial processes…” “… It would be a perverse extension of the concept to hold that open justice facilitates Google (or any other search engine) to thrust an individual’s arrest, accusation or legal misfortune in the face of every person who searches that individual’s name, and to do so with particular force (to ‘satisfy’ a