The Judicial Dilemma of the Right to Be Forgotten in the Digital Age and the Shift to Localization Paths

Abstract

Digital technology endows information with the technical characteristic of permanent storage, giving rise to the social governance challenge of "digital stigmatization ." Foreign General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) constructs a normative system for the right to be forgotten, centered on physical deletion and simultaneous cleanup across the entire network. This paradigm presents a structural contradiction with China's current civil rights framework and public law governance logic . An analysis of typical personality rights judgments such as the "Ren Jiayu v. Baidu case" and the current doctrinal application of Article 47 of the Personal Information Protection Law reveals that claims related to being forgotten in China's judicial arena are facing multiple normative obstacles: the principle of legality in civil rights creates a closed loop in judicial logic; existing deletion rights norms only apply to illegal actions, failing to address the personality infringement caused by the loss of relevance value of legally published information over time; and a complete transplantation of foreign deletion paradigms would also generate multiple institutional contradictions in terms of freedom of speech protection, digital technology adaptation, and the legitimacy of private entity regulation. This paper abandons the binary debate of "transplantation or rejection," employing functionalist comparative law as its analytical tool to propose a localized normative construction path that replaces deletion with data sealing. It rejects the core of foreign data erasure systems, focusing instead on severing identifiable links and implementing tiered restrictions on queries. It leverages existing public law systems in China for sealing minor offense records and public security violation records to achieve normative integration. Based on this, following a gradual legislative logic, it outlines a tiered institutional construction scheme extending from the criminal public domain to the general digital private domain, complemented by tiered interest balancing benchmarks and tripartite hearing and review procedures. Within the framework of current legal interpretation, it achieves systematic protection of digital personality interests, forming a digital amnesia normative system that differs from the EU's and aligns with the foundation of local rule of law.