Also known as: right to be forgotten · RTBF · data deletion
The right to erasure, commonly called the right to be forgotten, allows individuals to request deletion of their personal data in defined circumstances, such as when it is no longer necessary for the purpose it was collected for or consent has been withdrawn.
The right is not absolute. It is balanced against competing interests including freedom of expression, legal retention obligations, and public-interest archiving — which is why requests to delete journalism about someone are routinely refused.
Technically it is harder than it sounds. Genuine erasure must reach backups, analytics pipelines, third-party processors, and derived datasets, which is why crypto-shredding — destroying the encryption key rather than hunting every copy — has become a common implementation strategy.
GDPR
The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is the European Union's data protection law, which governs how personal data of people in the EU may be collected and processed, and grants individuals rights over their data regardless of where the processing organisation is based.
Data Subject Rights
Data subject rights are the legal entitlements individuals hold over their personal data, typically including the rights to access, correct, delete, port, and object to the processing of information held about them.
Data Minimization
Data minimisation is the principle that an organisation should collect and retain only the personal data actually necessary for a stated purpose, and no more, for no longer than needed.
Anonymization
Anonymisation is the process of altering data so that individuals can no longer be identified from it, either directly or by combining it with other available information — as distinct from pseudonymisation, which only replaces identifiers with reversible tokens.