Direito ao esquecimento: as colisões entre liberdades comunicativas e direitos fundamentais da personalidade

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyse the existence of the so-called "right to be forgotten", characterised as a desire of an individual regarding a fact from the past, published at the time, in a lawful way, not to be remembered in current or even past information (accessed through the Internet) by virtue of the disturbance caused to their life in the present. Not expressly implemented in Brazil, the right to be forgotten has emerged within a tense situation between communicative freedoms and fundamental personality rights, such as private life (not only treated herein as the traditional concept, but a more dynamic and relational definition, involving the control of personal data and information), image and honour. Considering that the absence of contemporaneous information is only one of the factual circumstances to be observed when assessing communicative freedoms and fundamental personality rights, the theory of principles developed by Robert Alexy is adopted as a model for resolving the tensions between fundamental rights. Based on this theoretical assumption, we examine communicative freedoms and fundamental personality rights in Brazil, in order to, in sequence, scrutinise the right to be forgotten from the foreign experience and in Brazilian cases. In addressing the desire to be forgotten in the traditional media and in the digital context, we differentiate its main aspects and its mechanisms of regulation and guardianship. We scrutinise the right to memory and truth, the right to informational self-determination, the storage of old news in digital Press archives and the removal of links from the search results in search engines, so-called de-indexation. Finally, we analyse specific cases submitted to the Judiciary Branch involving the right to be forgotten digitally in Brazil and we apply the rule of proportionality