Does the United States Have an Answer to the European Right to Be Forgotten?

©2014. Published in Landslide, Vol. 7, No. 1, September/October 2014, by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association or the copyright holder.

In May 2014, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Google had an obligation to remove listings from its search results that revealed an individual’s personal data.¹ The ruling has been hailed as a landmark for the so-called “right to be forgotten,” a European legal concept that allows individuals to have sensitive information about them “sink into oblivion.”²