The European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) was adopted in 2016 and becomes enforceable in May of this year. Article 17 mandates a right to erasure, more commonly called the right to be forgotten.

A right to be forgotten is tricky. It’s not immediately clear what this means or to what extent it’s even possible. That’s for lawyers and courts to work out. I can’t comment on the legal interpretation of the regulation. There are laws that require companies to delete information and laws that require them to retain information, and no doubt there are debates on how to reconcile these.

Here I want to look at some of the logical and statistical issues that come out of privacy laws, not necessarily the GDPR in particular, that mandate that information be forgotten.

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