The legal tension between digital permanence and the right to be forgotten

The jurisprudence of the right to be forgotten has evolved as a means of rehabilitation for persons acquitted of criminal charges, whose names incidentally appear in judicial records to which they were not parties, or who face continuing reputational harm from outdated or irrelevant information. This facet of the doctrine originates from the right to privacy guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution of India, as recognised by the Supreme Court in Justice KS Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India.

However, when the same doctrine is invoked by a real estate developer seeking to suppress its digital footprint, inter alia, records of legal disputes, whether pending or concluded, project delays, regulatory violations, or fund diversion, the right to be forgotten ceases to serve its original dignity-protecting purpose. Such information is not stale or irrelevant and is material to the decision-making of prospective homebuyers. The recent judgment of the Delhi High Court in R.S.S. Estate Limited Liability Partnership & Ors. v. State Government of NCT of Delhi and Anr. CRL.M.A. 20013/2026. brings this tension into sharp relief, testing the boundaries of the right to be forgotten against the competing imperatives of transparency, consumer protection, and open justice.

The matter originated in the registration of an FIR under Sections 420 and 120-B of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 at Police Station Economic Offences Wing, Delhi. R.S.S. Estate Limited Liability Partnership and its associated persons (“Petitioners”), engaged in real estate development and allied commercial activities, approached the Delhi High Court (“Court”) and secured the quashing of the FIR and other allied proceedings, following an amicable settlement between the parties. Thereafter, the Petitioners filed an application seeking masking and anonymisation of their names and personal identifiers from the publicly accessible digital records of the quashing proceedings along with directions to restrict name-based searchability of the aforesaid records through search engines and online legal data bases. The Court through an order dated July 13, 2026 (“Order”), dismissed the aforesaid application.

The Court draws a clear distinction between disputes arising in the course of commercial dealings and those falling within the personal sphere of an individual. While observing that the Petitioners are engaged in the business of real estate development from which the proceedings sought to be masked arose, the Court held that the continued accessibility of the judicial record is relevant and material to prospective investor and homebuyers seeking to assess the entity and associated persons with whom they propose to transact. The Court further held that the courts should be slow to erase from the public memory, legal history where no intrinsic personal liberty issue arise, the events that have a bearing on the future.

The Court draws upon the principles laid down in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India & Connected Matters, which established the doctrinal framework governing the relief of deindexing, which restricts name-based retrieval of judicial records through search engines and masking, which entails the replacement of personal identifiers including names of the parties with neutral references in publicly available digital records while preserving the unredacted version in the court’s internal records. The aforementioned reliefs are rooted in the right to informational privacy as a facet of Article 21 of the Constitution of India and are subject to proportionality analysis that weighs the harms caused to personal privacy of an individual against public interest in the continued association of a person’s name with the judicial records.

(i) The substantive character of information as a limiting principle

While the abovementioned case of Laksh Vir Singh Yadav identifies the entitlement to masking around acquittal, discharge, quashing, settlement and the conclusion of matrimonial and private civil disputes, the order departs from this framework by introducing a substantive criterion of the character of underlying information. The Court held that information pertaining to a commercial transaction undertaken in the course of business activities cannot be treated at par with information pertaining to personal privacy, thereby refusing the masking strictly on the substantive character of the information and its continuing relevance for the prospective stakeholders.

(ii) The test of bearing on the future

The case of Laksh Vir Singh Yadav treats the conclusion of proceedings by acquittal, settlement or quashing in the past as the ground for masking, on the rationale that continued association of the name causes disproportionate harm in the present. The order denies masking not on the ground that the harm to the petitioners is outweighed by an abstract public interest, but because the information retains continuing utility for prospective buyers, investors and stakeholders who may deal with the petitioners in the future. The bench further observed that quashing order itself records the complete account of proceedings i.e. the settlement and consequential quashing of proceeding. Accordingly, since the Court records are neither misleading nor incomplete, the case of masking is materially weakened.

(iii) Weighing harm: From presumption to evidence

Furthermore, while the judgement in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav appears to presume that continued association of an individual’s name with a judicial record in the public digital domain causes disproportionate harm to informational privacy within its eligible categories, the bench in the present case through the order departs from this position by requiring the Petitioners to demonstrate through evidence specific prejudice occasioned by continued availability of judicial records rather than presuming such harm.

The right to be forgotten, as evolved in constitutional jurisprudence, occupies a narrow but significant space carved out at the intersection of informational privacy, right to know/ information and freedom of expression. While the judgement in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav gives doctrinal structure to the framework, the order gives it doctrinal limitations. The order recognises that the value of right to be forgotten as a doctrine diminishes as claimant moves from personal to commercial sphere.

When a real estate developer seeks to suppress judicial records arising from commercial transactions undertaken by it, the proportionality analysis must account not only for the petitioner’s reputational harm but also for the continuing informational needs and right of investigation of prospective investor, homebuyer and stakeholder who have a right to be informed about the person/entity they seek to invest in. However, a question that remains unanswered is whether the right to informational privacy under Article 21 extends to corporate entities at all, or whether such entities must ground their claims in the narrow terrain of commercial reputation under Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution of India.

The judgment however settles the principle that digital memory of commercially significant events is a means of accountability that requires preservation. In the real estate sector, where information asymmetry is acute, trust is fragile and consequence of fraudulent activities reaps consumers of years of savings, the right to continued accessibility of judicial records acts as the last line of defence.

About the authors: Rohit Bajaj is a Partner, Abhimanyu Chattree and Arpita Mohapatra are Associates at Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s). The opinions presented do not necessarily reflect the views of Bar & Bench.

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