The always in expansion "Right to be Forgotten"​: a legitimate Oxymore in Compliance Law built on Information. Example of​ Cancer Survivors Protection

Full reference: Frison-Roche, M.-A., The always in expansion "Right to be Forgotten"​: a legitimate Oxymore in Compliance Law built on Information. Example of​ Cancer Survivors Protection, Newsletter MAFR - Law, Compliance, Regulation, 25th of August 2020 

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Summary of the news

The "right to be forgotten" is an invention of the Court of Justice of the European Union during the case Google Spain in 2014. It implies that digital firms block the access to personal data of someone who asks it. This "right to be forgotten", which permits to impose secret to third parties has largely been generalized by GDPR in 2016. This new fundamental subjective right is a very political and European right. United-States which, on the contrary of Europe, did not experience nazism, links the "right to be forgotten" to the protection of consumer, conception which especially leads California Consumer Privacy Act adopted in 2018 to link this right to a situation of absence of necessity of this data for the firm which obtained it. 

In Europe, this willingness to protect directly the person increases the scope of such a subjective right. Thus, in France and in Luxembourg, since 2020, a cancer survivor can thus ask that such an information is not accessible among his or her health data, especially for insurance companies which use them in their risk calculus to set premium amount. Netherlands will do the same in 2021 to fight against discrimination between banks' and insurances' clients. 

The "monumental goal" is therefore not so much here the protection of individual freedoms as the protection of the vulnerable person, which is bye the way the keystone of a Compliance Law, concealing sometimes prohibition to circulate information (as here) and sometimes obligation to circulate information (in other cases, where the alert must be given) depending on whether vulnerable people are protected either by one or by the other.