ERASING THE DIGITAL PAST: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE RIGHT TO BE FORGOTTEN IN INDIA, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM

Whether an individual may compel the removal of digitally preserved information about their past is among the most contested questions in contemporary information law. This article examines how India, the United States, and the United Kingdom have approached that question through constitutional text, primary legislation, and judicial decision and what their respective answers reveal about the deeper conflict between personal privacy and the public interest in an unimpeded flow of information. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 represents the country's first legislative attempt to translate the constitutional right to privacy, recognised in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, into an enforceable right of erasure. Against the backdrop of a First Amendment tradition that treats most restraints on truthful speech with deep suspicion, and a post-Brexit United Kingdom that has domesticated the European erasure framework but now charts an uncertain course of divergence, the article assesses the DPDPA's strengths, its structural omissions, and the unresolved tensions it leaves for adjudication. The central argument is that no jurisdiction has yet produced a satisfactory resolution of the privacy-expression conflict, and that principled adjudication requires a proportionality framework that gives real weight to both interests rather than treating either as categorically superior.