Critically examine the tension between open justice and individual privacy in the context of digital publication of court records.

Open justice — public access to hearings and judgments — is a constitutional safeguard of judicial accountability. But once records are digitised and indexed by search engines, a party's name becomes permanently retrievable, colliding with privacy under Article 21, recognised as a fundamental right in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) by a nine-judge bench [1].

The case for open justice

• Public scrutiny of reasoning deters arbitrariness; judgments are precedent, and anonymised law is unusable law for citation and research.
• Free online repositories and e-courts have democratised legal access for litigants and lawyers who cannot afford paid databases.
• Masking touches the public's right to information about who was prosecuted and why — an accountability cost, not merely a technical one.

The case for privacy

• Digital memory is permanent while human memory fades; a few keystrokes in an employer's background check can resurrect a closed case [3].
• An acquittal is a judicial declaration of innocence; perpetual online visibility inflicts a civil penalty the criminal process itself withheld — as the Karnataka High Court held in 2026, ordering registries, State police, Google and Indian Kanoon to mask an acquitted woman's name in an Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act case [3].
• Harm falls unevenly on women and vulnerable litigants in matrimonial, POCSO and trafficking matters, deterring them from approaching courts at all.

Where the tension remains unresolved

• India has no codified right to be forgotten; the DPDP Act, 2023 grants erasure against data fiduciaries but does not settle judicial records [2], leaving relief judge-made and inconsistent across benches.
• Enforcement spans court registries, police and private intermediaries, with no statutory compliance mechanism.

Puttaswamy itself framed privacy as a qualified right, so the answer is calibration, not choice. A statutory framework — anonymisation-by-default in sensitive categories, published masking criteria, and machine-readable takedown duties for intermediaries — would preserve precedent while restoring dignity, honouring both transparency and Article 21.