새로운 인격권으로서 잊힐 권리의 보장에 관한 고찰

Rapid growth of data communication technology created new data storage techniques and internet civil society ,creating a paradigm shift of information flow. In addition, the appearance of Web 2.0 and habituated daily use of smartphone recently made it possible to create information with ease, and similarly leading to the convenience of information acquisition in daily life. However, it brought not only advantages but problems such as invasion of privacy, defamation of character, or personal information protection because of circulating personal information on the Internet. In particular, once personal information is exposed to the Internet, it is not easy to be deleted due to internet characteristics, which is prone to make ill use of that like arbitrarily releasing one identity or witch-hunts using the profiling process of the Internet search engine. Therefore, the necessity of the right to be forgotten, the right of erasure of all the personal information on-line, arose and the EU tried to legalize it in January 2012, then further adopted all over the world. Accordingly, the right to be forgotten by the EU is worthy of notice in that data subjects are given the right to have their personal information deleted or prevented from diffusion in case of qualified data subjects, including their personal information which a manager of personal information saves under an agreement, which an information subject voluntarily provides while using Internet services and which is copied or linked by others. In this regard, it is hard to make a request to delete any information a data subject voluntarily gives or personal information copied or linked by others in reality because personal information protection laws in Korea are supposed to manage personal information only for business purposes. But the right to be forgotten championed by the EU also has problems such as information limit or technical limits, so its realistic possibility is uncertain. Thus, to establish the feasible limit of erasure, a manager of personal information should only delete data shadow within amenable personal information limits by using realizable techniques, and a data subject and a manager of personal information need to have the right to be forgotten rationally through the enactment of an Act such as the request to the right of blocking information searches or the expiration of statute of limitations. On the basis of the above explanation, when the right to be forgotten is introduced and established in Korea, it should be considered rationally.