The Right to be Forgotten

The United States has long treasured an almost unrestricted right to free speech. Increasingly, though, the right to privacy has also been seen as fundamental. Indeed, the Supreme Court recently wrote that “the text of the Fourth Amendment expressly guarantees the ‘right of the people to  be secure in their persons’, and our earliest precedents recognized privacy as the  ‘essence’ of the Amendment” . Sometimes, these two rights are in conflict, and in particular when there is embarrassing information about individuals when that information is not of public interest. The EU has recognized this as a “right to be forgotten”. Is such a thing permissible in the U.S.?

Resolved: that Congress should establish,  and that the First Amendment should be interpreted to permit, a “right to be forgotten”  that entitles individuals to compel search engines to delist information about  themselves when the interest in privacy outweighs the free speech interest  in continuing to list the information.

The standard debate policies and format apply.