The draft ignores the reason compulsory deindexing cannot happen in the United States: the First Amendment. To make the argument at all you must meet the obvious objection, not some set of straw objections instead. Whatever imaginary legal standard you devise, of which there are several, all balancing tests, the actual doctrinal limits are evident and do not involve any of the elements you invent. Discussion of Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo and its progeny is specifically necessary.

Increasing Importance of the Right To Be Forgotten

-- By KjLim - 03 Jan 2018

Introduction

Just as we should remain alert to the stealth gathering of personal information by tech giants, we should also fight to protect our personal information that is easily accessible on the web through search engines. Here, I discuss the so-called Right to Be Forgotten with which individuals can force search engines to remove links to certain personal information. Such a right has recently been developed in Europe where personal privacy has often been viewed as more important than freedom of speech and the press or the public’s right to know, and I argue this right should also be adopted in the U.S. where freedom of speech and the press is often considered more important than personal privacy.

Europe's (so-called) Right To Be Forgotten

U.S. Should Also Adopt Right To Be Forgotten

A case in point is the legal battle Mr. Catsouras from California had to fight in 2007 in order to remove from the internet gruesome pictures of his daughter fatally injured in a car accident. The manner of death was so horrific that Mr. Catsouras wasn't even allowed to identify his daughter's body, but soon after the accident, the pictures of his daughter were circulating on the internet. It was later found that Highway Patrol employees who took the pictures shared them without authorization with friends on Halloween. The pictures then spread across the internet quickly. When Mr. Catsouras tried to remove the pictures, it was almost impossible to take them down from every webpage that hosted them, and, more importantly, he did not have means to force Google to remove search results that link to those websites when people searched keywords such as the daughter's name, or "decapitated girl". Had he been able to force Google to do so, it would have been much easier for him to limit public's access to the pictures. The damage to his life in this case is greater than the benefit the public derives from Google's linking to the pictures, and warrants stronger protection for individual privacy.

Search Engines Are Not Mere Intermediaries Anymore

Additionally, I do not believe adopting the right will undermine press freedom and free speech to the extent that will outweigh privacy concerns. Adopting the right does not mean search engines would need to proactively censor what to link or not (which could seriously undermine press freedom/free speech), but adopting the right would give individuals at least some resource to remove damaging, inadequate, and/or irrelevant information. Surely the right to be forgotten should be balanced against press freedom and free speech and needs to be developed within reasonable scope, but the question of whether it should be adopted is clear to me.

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