The Uttarakhand High Court has directed the E-Courts Registry and the District Court, Udham Singh Nagar, to mask the name of a software professional from the publicly accessible digital records of a criminal case that was quashed in 2024. The software professional's name continued to appear as accused on the E-Courts Services website despite the quashing of the said proceedings.

Holding the above, Justice Alok Mahra observed that “the continued association of an individual's name with a judicial record in the public digital domain causes disproportionate harm to informational privacy, dignity and reputation” and directed that the petitioner's actual name be replaced with a neutral reference such as “ABC” or “XYZ”.

The petitioner had been named as an accused under Sections 323, 504 and 506 IPC. However, following a compounding application, the entire proceedings arising from the case were quashed by the High Court on June 6, 2024.

Despite the quashing, the petitioner's name continued to appear as an accused on the digital E-Courts portal. The petitioner submitted that he was working as a Software Professional and that the continued availability of his name on the portal was likely to prejudice his future career prospects. He therefore sought deletion, replacement or masking of his name with a pseudonym. Various precedents set by the Supreme Court and High Courts were relied on to submit that, once a criminal case is quashed or concluded, the concerned person has a “Right to be Forgotten.”

The Registry, while stating that it was principally in agreement with the law laid down by the Supreme Court and High Courts, expressed limitations in masking the petitioner's name in the absence of specific directions or guidelines.

The Single Bench observed that in the context of the case, “masking” means replacing a party's name and other necessary personal identifiers, including address and identity details, with a neutral reference such as “ABC” or “XYZ” in the publicly accessible digital version of a judicial record. It clarified that the complete unredacted version would continue to be preserved in the Court's internal records.

“What changes is only the direct association between a specific individual's name and the judicial record in the public digital domain,” the Court observed. It added that the record itself “remains accessible to courts, parties, advocates, authorities and persons who seek it through purposeful means”.

Importantly, the Court held that “the entitlement to masking flows from the same constitutional foundation as the entitlement to de-indexing, that is, the Right to Informational Privacy as a facet of Article 21, as recognised in the case of K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India. The proportionality analysis that underlines the Right to be Forgotten is equally important”.

“In cases of acquittal, discharge, or quashing, the presumption of innocence (a substantive guarantee under Article 21), requires that the judicial determination of innocence be given full practical effect. Masking gives that determination its full effect at the level of the court record itself.

In cases of settlement, the consensual extinguishment of the proceedings by the complainant removes any basis for the continued association of the individual's name with the record. In matrimonial and purely private civil disputes, K.S. Puttaswamy (supra), at para 323, identifies the sanctity of family life, marriage and personal relationships as lying at the very core of the protected zone of privacy. The intimate details of such proceedings have no legitimate claim to continued name-based retrievability once they have concluded”, the Court observed.

Furthermore, while laying down parameters governing the grant of masking relief, the Court clarified that masking operates both retrospectively, in respect of existing publicly accessible digital versions, and prospectively, in respect of future digitisation or uploading.

Significantly, the Court held that a masking order passed by the concerned Court constitutes an order of a competent Court for the purposes of Rule 3(1)(d) of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. Upon receipt of such an order, Google and other search engine operators are obliged to de-index the masked judgment from name-based search results, while Indian Kanoon and other hosts are required to disable name-based search functionality in respect of that judgment.

The concerned Court would also retain jurisdiction to review and revoke a masking direction if subsequent circumstances bring the matter within categories where such relief is not available, the High Court clarified. It also observed that masking applications should be disposed of expeditiously, considering the continuing nature of the harm caused by the availability of personal identifiers in the public digital domain.

Consequently, the High Court allowed the petition while issuing directions to the Registry of the High Court and the District Court, Udham Singh Nagar, to remove the petitioner's actual name from the E-Courts Services website and replace it with a pseudonym or neutral reference such as “ABC” or “XYZ” in connection with the criminal case.