5 Ways the Right to Delete Affects Your Life

The right to delete is a right to be forgotten.

Since the right to delete was enshrined in the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), many Europeans and others have started to exercise their rights by deleting Facebook, Google, and other online accounts.

What happens to your community when you delete? What happens when someone else deletes? These are questions we often asked ourselves before deleting our own profiles. To answer them and many more, we've created this little guide to explain how deleting affects your community.

The right to delete gives you control over your personal data.

From the moment you're born, you're being tracked by corporations. They want to know everything about you, from how much money your family makes to what type of underwear you prefer. But fortunately, there are ways to make yourself known in a world of data collection.

With the advent of the internet, businesses began utilizing services that store your data for various purposes (to sell you products and services). Businesses can't collect this data without first asking for your consent, so open up all of these emails from websites and services that are trying to collect it. Now's the time to find out exactly what information is being collected about you and why. If a site doesn't provide explicit information about what it's collecting about you and why, then stop using that site immediately! For example:

• Micca collects information on its users' shopping preferences in order to deliver more personalized recommendations; however if it would like to collect information on its users' political opinions or religious preferences in order promote certain candidates or products/services over others, then Micca must obtain explicit consent before doing so
• Google collects user search history as well as web visits in order to improve their advertising campaigns; however if Google were planning on selling this information (or some subset) to a third party who uses this information for purposes completely unrelated to advertising campaigns—for example: identifying potential terrorists or putting them on a no-fly list—then Google must inform users of this plan before they can begin storing user search histories or web visits
• Twitter collects tweets shown publicly by its users but also has access (by default) to direct messages sent between one Twitter user and another; however if Twitter decides that it wants direct messages from all Twitter users regardless of whether they have set their account settings such that their DMs aren't publicly visible by others, then Twitter must get permission from each user before doing so

Companies are responsible for complying with your requests to delete.

Right to be forgotten

In 2014, the European Court of Justice ruled that search engines are required to delete links to pages with “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” information about you. The ruling was a response to a case in Spain involving a man who complained that Google made it difficult for him to find work after its search engine linked him to his previous employer. His former employer had fired the man two years earlier, claiming he had racked up $40,000 in fraudulent expenses. The European Court of Justice found that this link violated the man's right-to-be-forgotten, and ordered Google remove the links upon request.

The right to be forgotten is not just an obscure legal decision—it affects everyone and can even affect your daily life. Some people report getting hired or promoted because their employers didn't find embarrassing personal details during their background checks; other people report being denied employment because there were unflattering personal details they were unable to erase from cyberspace. You may have run across websites that included your name if you'd been mentioned on social media sites like Twitter or Facebook; if those sites are required by law to remove your links from their search results (or even delete them completely), you no longer need worry about any digital footprint you may have inadvertently left behind.

You'll need to provide proof of ID when making a request.

When you request for your data to be deleted, you'll need to prove that you're the person in control of the information. You may have to provide proof of your identity and/or relationship with the data controller. This may include proof of who you are and how you are related or connected to the data controller.

The right to delete gives you the power over your personal data.

The right to be forgotten is a new addition to the data protection laws in the European Union. It gives you considerable power over your personal information: you can request a service provider erase any of your personal data held online, for example. If that's not enough, you can remove it from certain services and ask for it to be transferred to another provider instead. It also gives you more control over who has access to your data and where it is stored.

Teachers should teach this concept so students know how they should deal with their personal data.