There was a time when a court record, though public, was not as readily accessible as it is online. The record existed within the judicial system, but it did not follow a person everywhere. Still, a lawyer, journalist or litigant could go to a court registry to inspect a file.
Today, a matrimonial dispute, a quashed FIR, a divorce proceeding, or even an incidental mention in a judgment can appear instantly when a prospective employer, neighbour, client or colleague searches for a person’s name. A document that once sat in a court file now follows the person online long after the case is closed.
The problem is acute in family and matrimonial disputes. Court proceedings often record intimate details of relationship breakdowns, financial arrangements, allegations of cruelty, custody disputes, maintenance claims and settlement terms. These allegations, though relevant in court, may be untrue and defamatory. Once indexed by search engines, they can become available to anyone, forever. There have been several instances in which these records were used to profile people, deny them job opportunities or service engagements, and harass or bully them, both online and offline.
Even the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, which was intended to protect informational privacy, does not apply to personal data that is already publicly available, such as court records. This has also left many without a remedy and created a difficult gap.
This is the problem the Delhi High Court sought to address in its recent right-to-be-forgotten judgment in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v Union of India. The court considered a batch of petitions which argued that old or concluded judicial records, when searchable by name on search engines and legal databases such as Indian Kanoon, were causing ongoing harm to petitioners’ dignity, reputation, employment prospects and personal lives.
The Delhi High Court’s response was a balancing act between an individual’s rights to privacy, dignity, and informational self-determination on the one hand, and open justice, freedom of information, public accountability, and the legitimate public interest on the other. The court recognised the right against continued disclosure as part of informational privacy under Article 21, while making clear that the remedy is not the deletion of judicial history. It held that open justice requires that court records exist and remain accessible for legitimate purposes, but that it does not require a private individual’s name to serve as a permanent search key on search engines. It also clarified that the right to privacy is a constitutional fundamental right that applies not only against the government but also to private entities.
The court recognised a petitioner’s right to seek judicial redress to prevent the casual and indefinite discoverability of a person’s private legal history through search engines and online legal databases, where such discoverability does not serve any legitimate public interest. If the court is satisfied that an individual’s right to privacy is violated by that continued disclosure and that there is no overriding public interest, it could issue an order requiring search engines and legal databases to de-index such matters and directing them to mask names or remove name-based searchability.
It also recognises that the public interest must prevail in cases involving serious, ongoing concerns, public accountability, public figures acting in public roles, or convictions for which society has a legitimate reason to know.
While this only binds within the Delhi High Court’s jurisdiction, its sound reasoning will likely be cited by other High Courts. It offers individuals a structured way to seek relief when old or private judicial records continue to surface without serving any meaningful public interest. It may also prompt courts and legal databases to think more carefully about how names, identifiers and sensitive personal details are displayed online.
The ruling arrives at a time when artificial intelligence is reshaping the privacy debate. The old version of the right to be forgotten focused on search engines and databases. The new challenge is more complex. AI systems do more than retrieve personal information. They can reproduce it, draw new inferences from it, and resurface it in different contexts.
This makes the future of the right to be forgotten less about deleting data and more about preventing systems from continuing to disclose or generate the information. Once a model has been trained on data, it is not technically straightforward to make it forget a specific piece of information. Technologies such as machine unlearning are still evolving. AI companies may increasingly be expected to build safeguards to control what a model can output, provide channels for individuals to seek redress, and conduct auditing to ensure that restricted information is not surfaced again.
The Delhi High Court’s reasoning is particularly valuable on this point. By shifting the focus from how information is stored to the harm caused by its continued availability, the judgment’s logic applies to AI systems as much as to search engines.
Having said this, enforcing such orders will not be easy. Once something is published online, it rarely disappears for good, and petitioners may have to keep an eye out for this material to resurface later. The judgment offers no guarantee that the internet will forget. However, it reiterates that the law need not be a mere spectator to a world in which private misfortune becomes permanent public knowledge. It also leaves the door open to future constitutional right-to-privacy claims against private entities on the internet.
The author is Partner at Trilegal.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.
