—Jagrati Gupta, LL.M Graduate, Hidayatullah National Law University, Raipur, India
Can an individual ever truly outrun an internet search bar? The Delhi High Court in its decision on May 29, 2026, has reiterated the “Right to Be Forgotten” (RTBF) in the context of the Right to Informational Privacy enshrined under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. The High Court’s development of a balancing construct between privacy, freedom of speech and open justice has been a long over-due answer to a legal question that has been central to the contemporary digital era: should people be forever bound by their past online actions?
The Digital Memory Problem
The current era is marked by algorithms, permanent storage architectures and AI which possess the power to control public memory. No one now has the choice of being truly off the grid. With information no longer having a systemic value, there is the possibility of it still triggering some serious prejudices and having lasting consequences for job opportunities, credit scores and personal honour, just because of its constant online availability.
That is why a structural change is the need of the hour which should not lead to an absolute digital erasure, but ensures a selective visibility control to address the reality of permanent data trails. It is indeed hard to remove someone’s identity or public information off the Internet, but legal safeguards must ensure that past legal woes do not spread for eternity via a basic internet search.
Against this background, the Single Judge Bench of the Delhi High Court in a consolidated batch of 31 petitions, has delivered a significant judgment in the case of Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India & Ors. The Court recognised that the RTBF was part and parcel of informational privacy, protected as such under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. I argue that this judgement has formulated a viable balancing approach which can reconcile the principles of informational autonomy and freedom of speech in the context of Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution with the principles of open justice.
The petitioners had been acquitted of criminal charges filed against them, or had been the victims of sensitive offences whose names were leaked, or involved in some old civil and matrimonial disputes. It was reported that they felt they did not have a voice in their own stories and that the ongoing publication of the past legal proceedings in which they had been involved had negatively impacted their reputation, social standing and employment opportunities. They invoked the well-recognised Article 21 jurisprudence relating to protection of reputation and dignity, namely, Umesh Kumar v. State of Andhra Pradesh (2013) and Lal Krishna Advani v. State (2001).
The respondents, however, strongly disputed these assertions.
Google LLC and Microsoft claimed that their search engines are neutral intermediaries, which index public and third-party content automatically. They argued that the writ remedies under Article 226 of the Indian Constitution, which empowers the High Courts to enforce the fundamental rights, should not be applicable as they do not create or edit content.
The legal database, Indian Kanoon, had pointed out that the deletion or de-linking of information from public records amounts to private censorship of judicial documents which was argued to violate Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution.
For their part, media organisations invoked the principles of open justice and the public’s right to know, pointing out that an unrestricted RTBF could affect public memory and have a negative impact on journalistic archives.
Finally, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) argued that as information becomes public once it reaches the court records, privacy rights become a watered- down measure, and that the blocking powers under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, are not intended to enforce individual RTBF claims.
The High Court accepted the petitioners’ contention that perpetual digital accessibility of acquittals, discharged proceedings, victim identities, and intimate matrimonial disputes could impose a continuing burden on dignity, reputation, and personal autonomy long after the underlying controversies had ended. At the same time, it rejected the respondents’ absolutist positions. While affirming the importance of open justice and archival preservation, the Court held that these values cannot automatically extinguish informational privacy claims under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. In particular, it declined to accept MeitY’s submission that privacy rights become substantially diluted merely because information forms part of judicial records, observing instead that constitutional protections continue to operate in the digital environment and may warrant remedies such as de-indexing or masking in appropriate cases. The Court further recognized that the limited statutory framework of Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, does not exhaust the constitutional remedies available to individuals seeking protection of their dignity and privacy. Rather, competing claims of transparency, free expression, and informational self-determination must be reconciled through a context-sensitive balancing exercise.
Beyond Intermediary Neutrality: The Court’s Constitutional Intervention
One of the most significant aspects of the ruling is that it denies that search engines possess only a passive conduit status. Google’s characterization of itself as a neutral intermediary was held to be incorrect, with the Court’s reasoning that Google actively processes personal data through its services, collecting, indexing, organizing and serving personal data with the help of name-based search, and that it generates revenue through advertisements that leverage the use of this personal data. This activity amounts to an intrusion into the informational privacy of people in a material way.
The decision also recognizes that commercial algorithms have the potential to fundamentally alter public information. They influence the visibility and prioritization of content by aggregating, ranking and prioritizing it. The Court pointed to cases where such search results are overrun by old arrest records or charges even after an acquittal. The concept of open justice cannot be an automatic protection against such algorithmic amplification.
Importantly, the Court reaffirmed its constitutional authority under Article 226 of the Indian Constitution to issue directions against private commercial entities such as Google and Microsoft when their activities substantially impact on fundamental rights. In doing so, the Court filled a legislative gap, while reminding everyone that the RTBF is not a right that is presently guaranteed by law. It borrowed this right from the global privacy jurisprudence and defines RTBF as a form of informational self-determination, which allows individuals to have control over their personal information.
The Seven-Factor Balancing Framework
To ensure that the RTBF does not become a tool for arbitrary censorship, the Court developed a seven-factor balancing test that takes into account the nature of the information (private or public), its continued relevance, the public status of the person involved, the accuracy and completeness of the information, its effect on the person’s dignity and autonomy, the scope of digital accessibility and algorithmic amplification, and the impact of any restriction on freedom of expression and public records. The Court also pointed out that there are certain classes of cases in which de-indexing would not be warranted, such as those involving offences against women and children, especially under the POCSO Act, 2012, and corruption, financial fraud or violation of public trust by the person in public office.
Importantly, this remedial framework does not merely concern the absence of information, but rather the visibility of such information. The Court directed the search engines to remove the problematic content from name-based searches, but recognized that they could continue to provide access via topic-based searches, legal research keywords, case citations, and court records. Likewise, legal databases like Indian Kanoon were instructed to limit searches by name but still allow searches by case number, citations, dates, and court information. The Court also urged Indian judicial registries to use masking to anonymize names in the public records while keeping the original records for institutional use. In this way, de-indexing decreases digital amplification at the intermediate level and masking deals with privacy at the source. The Court is not seeking to wipe away history, but to reshape the ways in which it can be accessed.
Placing the Judgment in Privacy Jurisprudence
The judgment provides coherence to the historically inconsistent sub-national RTBF jurisprudence in India. In the earlier decision of Dharmraj Bhanushankar Dave v. State of Gujarat 2015, the Gujarat High Court had refused to expunge criminal records on the ground that there was no statutory provision for it. On the other hand, the Karnataka High Court in the case of Sri Vasunathan v. The Registrar-General (2017) acknowledged that the right to anonymity was called for in sensitive or matrimonial cases.
The constitutional basis of the Delhi High Court’s judgment is well established in the Supreme Court’s ruling in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), where the Court declared privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. The Delhi HC ruling seeks to operationalize the specific observation made by Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul in Puttaswamy, which recognized that informational privacy also encompasses the digital existence of an individual, and that he /she has a right to control his/her digital data.
To contextualize this evolving Indian approach, it is essential to trace its lineage back to the global jurisprudence where the concept first matured, the RTBF became known worldwide through the judgement given by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Google Spain (2014) and the now famous Article 17 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). But the Delhi High Court differs in certain aspects from the European model. The CJEU had restricted de-indexing to the limits of the EU borders as laid down in Google v. CNIL, 2019, but while the Delhi High Court considers de-indexing to be possible worldwide when it is essential to safeguard Article 21 rights. Moreover, the Indian judicial model also emphasizes targeted visibility control, which is to be distinguished from the comprehensive statutory right to erasure in the GDPR to ensure public archives and open justice.
Practical and Doctrinal Challenges
At the same time, the judgment poses some practical issues. Firstly, media companies could be burdened with major administrative challenges in managing historical archives and adhering to the new and expanding de-indexing instructions. In addition, the Court’s use of the term “positions of responsibility or influence” brings a subjective standard into the definition of who qualifies as a public figure for the purposes of RTBF claims, which needs to be clarified in future.
Secondly, technological enforcement is also challenging. These search engines operate via a continuous and automatic crawling and indexing, which means that global de-indexing is technically problematic without constant monitoring.
Lastly, there are structural conflicts within the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, 2023. Section 12 thereof acknowledges the rights to data rectification and deletion, but Section 12(2) allows for continued processing when required by law. This may lead to a conflict between the constitutional claims of RTBF and the statutory obligations relating to public records through the writ jurisdiction. Ultimately, the courts may have to ensure that the statutory exceptions permitting continued data processing are not being interpreted so broadly that they undermine the privacy protections under Article 21. Otherwise, such constitutional safeguards will become significantly diluted.
Conclusion
The Delhi High Court’s decision is a major step towards jurisprudence regarding privacy in India. The Court abandoned the idea of “neutral search engines” and recognised that the search engines have a proactive impact on information visibility. It has left its indelible mark on the concept of digital dignity which is quite different from the Right to Be Forgotten in India as it is the right to be invisible to the public and not to be erased entirely.
Suggested citation: Jagrati Gupta, Whose Memory, Whose Dignity? Reconciling Open Justice and Informational Privacy under the Indian Constitution, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Jul. 10, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/whose-memory-whose-dignity-reconciling-open-justice-and-information-privacy-under-the-indian-constitution/