A few days ago, I found myself staring at Facebook's Profile Lock feature and thinking:
“Wait… is this basically the Right to Be Forgotten?”
It felt like a reasonable conclusion.
Once you lock your profile, strangers can no longer freely browse your photos, personal information, or many of your posts. To someone unfamiliar with data protection law, it almost looks as though you've disappeared from the public eye.
For a moment, I genuinely thought Facebook had quietly built one of the most famous rights in modern data protection law into its platform.
Then I went back to the law.
And I realised I had made a mistake.
Not a careless mistake—but one that many people could easily make because the two ideas are built on the same foundation.
Facebook's Profile Lock is not the legal Right to Be Forgotten.
Yet the comparison raises an interesting question: if they are different, why do they feel so similar?
The answer says a lot about where privacy law is headed.
I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you think features like Facebook's Profile Lock genuinely enhance privacy, or is true digital privacy only possible when our data is erased altogether?