The “Right to Forget” with Prot-On is possible

During the last few months we are hearing a lot about “The right to forget” for internet users. In summary this means that anyone can require that Internet service providers remove any reference to them which they might have posted. The European Union is moving forward steadily in making a law to protect this right.

It is clear that implementing this would be quite complex and it is probably impossible to implement it with a guarantee that it has been done with full retroactive nature because most providers do not have all of the personal information they store indexed properly. This said, however, Prot-On can make it possible that this right becomes a reality in the future.

A service provider on the Internet that is posting personal data could store all of their information protected with Prot-On. When faced with a user request to exercise their right to forget the service provider would only have to remove access permissions granted to the documents owned by this user. In addition, a simple integration with the Prot-On service would allow the provider to easily filter the information and distinguish that which can no longer be displayed from that which can.

In any case, and while the laws and regulations are not a reality, our “right to forget” starts with us beginning to exercise it. If what we share about ourselves we do so always by first protecting it with Prot-On, although we give access to anyone, we hold the key to revoke such access when, for whatever reason, we want to make that information disappear: photos, wall entries, blogs…