While waiting for the effective entry into force of the new European Personal Data Protection Regulation, which for the first time encodes the right to be forgotten in accordance with the principles of the case-law and the elaborated guidelines of WP Art. 29, is interesting to observe how such a right is finding consistency both in terms of application boundaries and with reference to the the requirements for such application.

The right to be forgotten implies a difficult balancing between the individual's interest in the omission of his personal affairs, the right of the community to be informed and kept updated on the facts at the grounds of common beliefs, and the complementary duty of information of journalists.

Thus, even if there is no unambiguous definition of this right in the processing of personal data for journalistic purposes or for other information purposes, it can be defined as the party's right to ask the holder of a newspaper, a blog or a search engine termination of the processing of your personal data, used for information purposes, by deleting or downing search engine ranking, whenever the news is no longer current or there is no longer a general interest in knowing it. An essential prerequisite for its exercise is the passing of a large amount of time, which in fact eliminates the interest that existed at the time the news was published.

In this regard, the milestone ruling so called "decalogo" (i.e. guide) made it clear that, lacking the consent of the person concerned, the publication of an article and, subsequently, its retention in the open archive of an online journal, can only be made if the facts reported are true or believed true, are exposed in an objective manner and if the news is of public interest. With the right to be forgotten a fourth requirement is added, since the information shall be current. This is closely related to the third feature, requiring that the interest of the community exists not only when the personal data is published, but also during the whole period when it can be accessed.

Thus, in the current and temporary regulatory vacuum, some wish to make the innovative scope of the new right, born with the Costeja Ruling, more extreme, in order to conscientiously eliminate certain aspects of their identity and past online. However, the right to be forgotten must be understood solely as a form of protection for the individual so that prejudicial news cannot be disseminated, except in the presence of valid and current reasons, thus giving rise to a so called media pillory.

This constitutes therefore a right to a correct historical reconstruction of the facts and, consequently, does not have to be interpreted as a possibility of effective cancellation of the injurious news (except when a defamation offense is acknowledged); more correctly, it shall consist of a decrease in the search engine rank.

Moreover, for this right to apply, a specific set of considerations should be made on the individual case, which are not limited to the merely quantitative assessment of the time elapsed since the availability of the information on the search engines.

Indeed, as recently pointed out by the Criminal Supreme Court (Cassazione Penale) in Judgment no. 38747 of August 3rd 2017, above all, starting from the Privacy Authority ruling of 15 June 2017, the right to be forgotten may meet a limit when the information for which it is invoked is related to the role of the person concerned in public life as well as relevant to the formation of public opinion.

It would not be allowed, in any democratic country, to provide the elimination of historical memory and, in order to achieve the balance between all the interests at stake, it is consequently apparent that the practical application of the right to be forgotten occurs through the de-indexing from search engines, making it possible to find significant news in the online archives of websites, and not as the first result of a simple search, say, on Google.