Blockchain and the right to be forgotten.

Summary On May 13, 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued the Google Spain ruling, which granted European citizens the right to request the deletion of search results leading to websites containing inaccurate, inadequate or excessive information about them. The right to be forgotten is based on the protection of privacy: it implies/assumes that individuals do not have to account indefinitely for shameful or unpleasant events with which they have been associated in the distant past. More broadly, the right to be forgotten could be described as an attempt to reconcile the human need to be rehabilitated or forgiven with the role of the Internet as a digital record of history (Leta Jones, 2016). This opposition has become even stronger since the emergence of new decentralized databases, known as blockchains, the technology used by the Bitcoin network. Insofar as the blockchain is unalterable and resistant to censorship and modification by design, it is in direct conflict with the right to be forgotten. This contribution seeks to analyze the challenges posed by these emerging technologies vis-à-vis the right to be forgotten. We will first introduce the right to be forgotten (I) and the blockchain (II), we will then analyze whether the right to be forgotten is applicable to the blockchain (III) and, if so, we will further examine whether and how obligations related to the right to be forgotten can be enforced on the blockchain. (IV).