The Right To Be Forgotten

How might we design products that let people step back from data collection, shrink, or even erase their digital selves in a world where platforms are built to remember us forever? Starting from the personalisation–privacy paradox, this talk examines how contemporary UX and product practices normalise continuous data capture, and asks what it would mean to design for forgetting instead. While the “right to be forgotten” in Article 17 of GDPR (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) sets out a legal right to erasure, rights on paper do not automatically become usable experiences in practice. This talk introduces a speculative “The Right to Be Forgotten” project and the biomimicry‑inspired Boxfish privacy device concept as “trim tabs” (Fuller, 1972): small interventions on the level of individual that add friction, negotiation, and exit routes into everyday data collection flows. Finally, it presents usable privacy approaches and patterns that help design practitioners bring these values into everyday product decisions, enabling more honest and agency‑preserving user experiences.

About the speaker:

Biki Viktoria is a Wiesbaden-based digital product designer and founder of Boxfish Labs, a human cyber resilience startup. She works in an interdisciplinary team of cybersecurity experts and creatives to explore human factors in cybersecurity and the impact of technology on user behavior, decision-making, and digital safety. Her practice combines HCI, future-thinking methodologies, participatory and service design to create safer digital environments, focusing on the impact of technology on human behavior. She holds a Master’s degree in Interaction Design from Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME).