Summary

Chapter Four describes “the right to be forgotten” and its contrasting role in Europe and the United States. In 2014, the European Court of Justice adopted this right for enforcement throughout the European Union. Under its ruling, Google and other search engines must provide Europeans with a method for removing search results connected to them that they consider irrelevant. The information, including past financial or criminal difficulty, need not be false to warrant removal, but rather no longer “relevant,” likely because a sufficient amount of time has passed. The author provides a sampling of stories that were removed from Google search results due to this ruling. It primarily includes cases of criminal activity and distasteful behavior by public figures. Abrams assumes that all of these stories are reasonably accurate, or else they could have been removed under different mechanisms, and that they were sufficiently...