The right, enshrined in Article 17 of the GDPR, to obtain the deletion of one's personal data, tested by the absorption of data into AI models.
The right to be forgotten, or right to erasure, enshrined in Article 17 of the GDPR, allows any person to obtain the deletion of their personal data, in principle within one month. It rests on a technical presupposition, that the data is stored in an identifiable location that can be located then destroyed. Artificial intelligence breaks this presupposition, for it does not archive the data but absorbs it, diffusing it across millions of parameters where it becomes inseparable from the rest. Erasure, conceived as absolute and binary, then turns into an approximate and unverifiable forgetting, and the right to disappearance becomes a right to attenuation. The durable answer shifts upstream, to data sobriety, for the best protection against a request for erasure remains never having absorbed the data.
A policyholder requests the erasure of their data from a pricing model; the insurer can technically neither reliably remove them nor prove their disappearance, which leaves it exposed to a sanction.
droit à l'effacement, right to erasure, article 17 RGPD