Study on a scheme for the right to be forgotten

It is a well-known fact that young people frequently access and post their personal data to social networking services (SNSs) to facilitate better personal relationships. However, such information on SNSs can lead to invasion of privacy. On the other hand, there has been an increasing tendency toward protecting privacy throughout the world as per the Privacy by Design (PbD) concept. Among the seven fundamental principles of PbD, we especially focus on “the right to be forgotten.” Establishing a scheme for this leads to solving certain privacy-invading problems, including recent undesirable topics like “revenge porn” and “digital tattoos.” This paper shows three requirements for implementing the right to be forgotten by examining active and passive privacy on SNSs. These requirements lead to technical solutions combining secret sharing and digital watermarking. Our proposed method is quite simple and merely a combination of existing techniques. However, from a privacy standpoint, it can sufficiently realize the right to be forgotten. We evaluated our proposal from the standpoints of privacy and security. Our contribution is the examination of requirements and proposing protocols that implement the right to be forgotten.