The UK is working on new data protection draft (rules) that has been confirmed in the Queen's Speech recently. It is aimed at having a data protection regime that is fit for the 21st century standards and provides more comprehensive protection of personal data. For this purpose, individuals will be empowered to have more control over their personal data on social networks era.

As it is well known to all, deleting posts that are shared on social media websites such as Facebook or Twitter does not mean they disappeared from the Internet entirely. In fact, they continue to live in other online platforms. The likely negative effects of this fact especially on the children's adults life is particularly taken into consideration by the law-maker. Thereby, creating an easy system which enables data owners to delete that kind of post from the internet has been expected for a long time and was an issue of concern in the UK's press.

The Queen's speech proved that the UK's political will is about to take action on this concern as it is said that they will give young people the right to demand social networks delete any personal data they had shared prior to turning 18. In this way, the person who shared data on the internet in his/her childhood as not being aware of the risks involved, later would be able to remove such personal data easily after legalization of this new regime.

"The right to be forgotten" or "Right to erasure" is basically the right –under certain conditions-for data subjects to ask search engines to remove their personal information after a certain period of time.

The subject of the right to be forgotten become more important upon the Court of Justice of the European Union's ("CJEU") decision in 2014 and this decision introduced more clear principals regarding the subject.  

CHEU's decision dated May 13, 2014 was based on the provisions of Directive No. 95/46/EC on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data.

The court found that in this particular case; providing the link that has information about the person's action that happened 16 years ago could not be justified and Google can be required to remove the personal data relating to him, so that it no longer appeared in the search results. In its ruling the Court determined exceptions for the right to be forgotten as follows; "the information's significant importance in public life"; "people's intense interest on the subject" and "superior public interest".

Upon those advancements in EU, "right to be forgotten" regulated for the first time as a normative regulation under Article 17 of "Directive (EU) 2016/679 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data, and repealing Directive 95/46/EC" which is going to be entered into force as of 25 May 2018. According to the provision, the data subject shall have the right to demand from the controller the erasure or stop the processing of personal data concerning him or her, under a certain conditions such as where there is no other legal ground for the processing or the data subject withdraws consent on which the processing is based.

Despite the fact that there is no direct regulation on the right to be forgotten in Turkish Law, it is still possible for individuals to demand their personal information on digital platforms to be removed. In Turkish Constitutional Court's ruling dated September 15, 2016, the Court decided that rejection of the applier's demand, who was sentenced of use drugs in 1998-1999, regarding the erasure of his personal data from internet is unconstitutional, and resulted the file according to the applier's demand. This is a significant development for being the first example of the "right to be forgotten" that finds a place in our law.

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