Violation of the Right to Be Forgotten on the Internet: Legal Overview of Tort Law Aspects

The current digital revolution, in particular the Big data phenomenon, has raised new legal challenges in accordance with the demands of the social and democratic rule of law to adapt its legal order to the new scenario. This scenario has led to the creation of the right to be forgotten in response to citizen demands regarding the potential violation of the right to privacy entailed by the storage, processing and mass transfer of personal information. Against this background, the GDPR regulates several pathways through which a person can gain custody of their right to be forgotten, in that whoever suffers harm as a consequence of an infraction of its provisions will be entitled to receive compensation for both patrimonial and moral damage. However, the GDPR does not create a system of either strict or subjective liability related to the damage and this raises a number of legal issues in terms of achieving effective compensation for the affected party and also begs the question of whether the right to be forgotten is an efficient mechanism to resolve these new legal issues.