SWITCHED ON
The daily technology series nobody asked for but everyone needed
Delete Me: The Fight for the Right to Be Forgotten
Who has your data, what they're doing with it, and why the tech industry really, really doesn't want you to have the power to disappear.
The right to be forgotten is worth fighting for. But let's not mistake the ambulance for the fence.
In Episode 3 we established that synthetic reality is no longer a future problem — it is a present one, operating at scale, largely unregulated, and moving faster than the legal and social frameworks designed to contain it. If you missed it, go back. It'll make you appropriately paranoid about the next video you watch online, which is, frankly, the correct response.
Today we're going somewhere that sounds bureaucratic but is actually one of the most philosophically interesting and politically explosive questions in technology policy right now. We're talking about data. Specifically your data. More specifically: what happens when you want it gone, who gets to decide whether it actually disappears, and why the answer to that question says everything about who actually holds power in the digital age.
We're talking about the right to be forgotten. And before you click away because that sounds like a Brussels regulation document rather than something that matters to your actual life — stay with me. Because this one is about you, specifically. Your name in a search result. Your photograph on a platform you deleted three years ago. Your worst moment, indexed and retrievable forever, by anyone, at any time, for the rest of your life. That is the world we currently live in. And there is a fight happening — right now, in courts and parliaments and Silicon Valley boardrooms — about whether it has to stay that way.
01 — How We Got Here: The Internet Has a Perfect Memory and Absolutely No Conscience
Let's establish something that seems obvious but has genuinely radical implications when you sit with it: the internet never forgets. This is not a metaphor. This is a technical and commercial reality. Every piece of content you have ever posted, every form you have ever filled in, every purchase you have ever made, every search query you have ever typed — all of it exists somewhere, in some database, belonging to some company, being processed for some purpose.
The early internet had the quality of impermanence — things disappeared, servers went down, GeoCities pages vanished into the digital ether and nobody mourned them. It felt ephemeral. It felt human-scaled. Then came Google. Then came Facebook. Then came the cloud. Then came data brokers — an entire industry, largely invisible to most people, whose entire business model is the aggregation, packaging and sale of personal information about individuals who have absolutely no idea this is happening to them.
Right now, there are companies you have never heard of holding files on you containing your name, address, family relationships, health conditions inferred from your search history, and approximately forty other data points you did not consent to share with anyone.
Not with them, anyway.
02 — The Case For: Why This Is Actually Just Reasonable
The right to be forgotten — formally the right to erasure under the EU's General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR — is the legal mechanism by which individuals can request that organisations delete their personal data under certain circumstances. The philosophical case for it is not radical. It argues that people should have agency over their own narratives. That a mistake made at twenty-two should not necessarily define a person at forty-five. That the person who served a prison sentence and rebuilt their life deserves something approaching a fresh start.
Human societies have always had mechanisms for forgetting. Spent convictions. Bankruptcy discharge. The simple passage of time and the fading of social memory. These mechanisms exist because we understand, collectively, that permanent punishment for past actions is incompatible with rehabilitation, growth, and basic human dignity.
The internet abolished those mechanisms. Not intentionally. Not maliciously. Just incidentally, as a byproduct of building systems optimised for retrieval rather than forgetting.
And the right to be forgotten is, at its core, an attempt to restore something that was taken away without anyone really noticing or consenting to its removal. That seems, to me at least, like a reasonable thing to want back.
03 — The Case Against: And It Is Worth Taking Seriously
The opposition to the right to be forgotten is not simply "tech companies want your data and will say anything to keep it." Though that is true and worth noting. The substantive objections are real. The most serious one is the tension with freedom of information and the public interest. A news article documenting a public official's misconduct contains data about that individual. A court record of a fraud conviction contains data about the convicted person. If individuals can compel the deletion of accurate information about themselves, the result is not just personal privacy — it is the selective rewriting of the historical record by the people with the most motivation to rewrite it.
This is not hypothetical. Under the EU's right to be forgotten framework, operational since 2014, Google has received millions of removal requests. Some are entirely legitimate. Others are troubling — politicians requesting the removal of articles about their voting records, executives seeking to delist coverage of corporate misconduct, a doctor successfully getting patient complaint records removed from search results. The right to be forgotten, applied without appropriate limits, is a censorship mechanism in privacy clothing. And the people with the resources and motivation to weaponise it are not vulnerable private individuals. They are powerful people with things to hide.
04 — What's Actually Happening Right Now
The GDPR's right to erasure is now eight years old. The California Consumer Privacy Act has similar provisions. Brazil's LGPD. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act. The right to erasure is spreading through global data protection law with the consistency of something whose time has genuinely come. The enforcement picture is more complicated. GDPR fines have been significant — Meta was fined €1.2 billion by Irish regulators in 2023. But enforcement is patchy, under-resourced, and slow relative to the pace at which violations occur. The supervisory authorities responsible are, bluntly, outgunned by the legal teams of the companies they're regulating.
Data brokers remain remarkably underregulated. In the United States, there is no federal data broker law. The patchwork of state regulations is exactly what you'd expect: insufficient, inconsistent, and trivially circumvented. The tech platforms have implemented erasure tools with the same energetic commitment to user empowerment that characterises all of their privacy features — which is to say, they've built the tools, and designed them just effortful enough that most people give up before completing the process. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is interface design as policy.
05 — The Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly Enough
Here's what the right to be forgotten debate consistently misses: we spend most of our energy arguing about whether individuals should be able to request deletion of data already held by large platforms. Which is important. But it misses the more fundamental question. How did all of this data get collected in the first place?
The right to be forgotten is, structurally, a remedial right. It addresses a problem after it has already occurred. You have been tracked, profiled, packaged, and sold. Now you'd like the option to do something about it. What we have consistently failed to build is meaningful consent at the point of collection. Not the forty-seven-page terms of service that nobody reads before clicking "I agree." Not the cookie consent banner deliberately designed to make "accept all" one click and "manage preferences" a twenty-step odyssey. Genuine, informed, granular consent from people who actually understand what they're consenting to, before any data is collected at all. That would be genuinely transformative. It would also be genuinely disruptive to the business models of companies whose market capitalisation runs into the trillions. Which is, not coincidentally, why it hasn't happened.
Tomorrow we're going somewhere that is, improbably, even more personal than your data. We're talking about your face. Specifically the growing deployment of facial recognition technology in public spaces — by governments, by retailers, by employers, by anyone who can afford the software — and the question of whether having a face in public constitutes consent to being identified, tracked, and logged. It does not. And yet. See you then.
Switched On is a daily technology series covering AI, social media, data privacy, and the digital forces reshaping modern life — with no corporate spin, no false comfort, and absolutely no mercy for buzzwords.
