In Search of Oblivion? How the ‘Right to be Forgotten’ Could Undermine Web-based Corpora

Corpus linguists are now facing a new challenge to collecting accurate data for web-based corpora: the ‘Right to be Forgotten’. This element of data protection legislation allows individuals to request that links to webpages be removed if the information contained there can now be considered inaccurate, irrelevant or excessive. The potential difficulties this poses for researchers are illustrated by my experience collecting data for a corpus of neologisms appearing in online versions of UK national newspapers.