Reconceptualizing the Right to Be Forgotten to Enable Transatlantic Data Flow

Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

Based on the authors’ recent Harvard Journal of Law and Technology article, Reconceptualizing the Right to be Forgotten to Enable Transatlantic Data Flow, Sanna Kulevska and Michael Rustad will lay out the legal dilemmas that flow from the European Union’s far-reaching right to be forgotten (RTBF). Google Spain v. AEPD (May 2014) and Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will go into effect in 2018, are already driving a significant legal, economic and cultural wedge between the U.S. and its EU trading partners. In October 2015, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) struck down the U.S./EU Safe Harbor agreement that enabled data to be freely transferred from Europe to the United States and in February 2016, the EU/U.S. Privacy Shield was proposed as a replacement. Sanna and Michael will lead the discussion of the legal dilemmas that policymakers face in walking the tight rope between the Scylla of constraining the right of expression and the Charybdis of diminishing an individual’s right to control their personal data. The authors will use current case studies of takedown requests from Google to provide context for their discussion of how a Safe Harbor 2.0 might achieve the proper balance between expression and privacy. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/03/Kulevska%20Rustad