Forgetting the First Amendment: How Obscurity-Based Privacy and a Right to Be Forgotten Are Incompatible with Free Speech

The privacy of personal information on the Internet has received special attention recently in both the United States and the European Union, and legislative and regulatory proposals regarding the reform privacy law abound. This article examines several prominent theories that undergird the American First Amendment and attempts to demonstrate that the concept of a privacy interest arising out of the obscurity of information, as a social normative principle, and the right to be forgotten, as a legal mechanism concerned with the European idea of dignity-based privacy, are fundamentally at odds with the right of freedom of speech.