In the last years, some former cancer communities have claimed for the right to be forgotten as a “patient” as the right not to disclose one’s past pathology after a reasonable period has passed since treatment ended.
But what exactly is the right to be forgotten and how is it applied in the health field? Does the patient’s interest to lawfully omit his medical history coincide, totally or partially, with the right to claim for erasing personal data provided for by the General Data Protection Regulation? Can the “right to be forgotten” (under the GDPR) be used as a picklock to not declaring one’s health data?
In this paper, we will examine two different issues: the first one, related to the “right to be forgotten as a patient” and the scope of Article 17 of the GDPR; the second one, related to the dimension of the “right to be forgotten” meant as the right to erasure of personal data in the health field.
