Right to Be Forgotten in the US: Why It Doesn’t Exist & What to Do Instead

If you have been trying to get a news article or damaging search result removed, you have probably come across the phrase “right to be forgotten.” It sounds like exactly what you need. European citizens can ask Google to remove outdated or irrelevant results, and Google has to seriously consider the request. The system has processed over a billion such requests since 2014.

If you are in the United States, here is the direct answer: the right to be forgotten does not apply to you. There is no federal law, no equivalent mechanism, and no form you can fill out to invoke it.

That does not mean you are out of options. It means your options work differently. Understanding why this right does not exist here helps clarify what tools you actually have.

What the Right to Be Forgotten Actually Is

The right to be forgotten came from a 2014 ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union. A Spanish lawyer named Mario Costeja Gonzalez asked Google to remove links to an old newspaper notice about a debt he had paid years earlier. The court sided with him. It established that individuals could ask search engines to remove links to information that was “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” relative to the purpose it originally served.

That right was later written into the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, known as GDPR, which took full effect in 2018. Under GDPR, people in the European Union can submit requests to search engines to de-index specific URLs. Google reviews each request and weighs the individual’s privacy interests against the public’s interest in the information. As of 2024, Google has evaluated over 1.3 billion URL removal requests under this framework.

The UK has equivalent protections through the Data Protection Act following Brexit. Argentina and several other countries have enacted similar rights. The common thread is data privacy law that gives individuals a say in how information about them stays accessible online.

Why It Does Not Exist in the United States

The First Amendment is the core reason. The US legal system treats freedom of expression as a foundational right, and courts have consistently held that compelling a search engine to suppress accurate, legally published information would constitute impermissible compelled speech. The Ninth Circuit addressed this directly in Garcia v. Google, noting that the right to be forgotten, while affirmed in Europe, is not recognized in US law.

This is not for lack of public support. A survey cited by the American Bar Association found that nine out of ten Americans support some version of the right to be forgotten. As of 2025, Congress has debated but not passed any federal legislation creating this right.

The underlying tension is real. The First Amendment protects publishers and platforms from being forced to remove truthful content. Courts have repeatedly upheld that protection even when the information causes ongoing harm to people who have moved past whatever the content describes.

What Americans Have Instead

The absence of a right to be forgotten does not leave Americans without recourse. It means the options are narrower, more case-specific, and require more effort. Here is what actually applies in the US.

Google’s personal information removal policies. Google removes search results that display your home address, phone number, email address, government ID numbers, bank account details, and other specific categories of sensitive information. This is not the right to be forgotten and it does not apply to news articles generally. However, it is a real and working mechanism when the qualifying content is present. The Results About You tool is the practical way to use it.

Google’s outdated content removal. If a page has been deleted or substantially changed and Google is still showing an old cached version, you can submit the URL through Google’s Remove Outdated Content tool to force a recrawl. This is a technical fix, not a privacy right, but it achieves the same outcome when the source has already been taken down.

Defamation claims. If the information is false, you may have grounds for a defamation claim. A successful case can result in a court order compelling removal. This requires the content to be factually untrue, not just unflattering or outdated. It is a legal right, not a privacy right, but the practical result can be the same.

Direct publisher requests. Outside of any legal framework, many publishers will remove or update articles when approached professionally with documentation showing why the content is outdated or inaccurate. This depends on each publication’s editorial policy, but it works more often than people expect. Our full guide on removing news articles from Google covers this process in detail.

State Privacy Laws: The Closest Equivalent

More than a dozen states have now passed comprehensive consumer privacy laws that include some form of data deletion right. These include California, Colorado, Connecticut, Texas, Virginia, Montana, and others. Under these laws, individuals can request deletion of their personal data from qualifying businesses.

There is an important limit, however. These state laws apply to businesses that collect and process personal data, primarily data brokers, advertising platforms, and similar commercial operations. They do not give individuals the right to demand that Google remove a news article from search results the way GDPR does. They are genuinely useful for the data broker problem: the Spokeo listings, the BeenVerified profiles, the background check sites that publish your address alongside your name. Our data broker opt-out guides cover how to use these rights across the major platforms.

Mechanism	Applies in US?	What it covers
EU Right to Be Forgotten (GDPR)	No (narrow exceptions for EU-connected individuals)	Search engine de-indexing of irrelevant or outdated personal information
Google personal information removal	Yes	Specific categories: address, phone, government ID, financial info
State privacy law deletion rights	Yes, in 12+ states	Data broker profiles; does not cover news articles or search results
Defamation claim	Yes	False statements only; requires litigation or legal threat
Publisher removal request	Yes	At publisher’s discretion; no legal compulsion

What This Means for Your Situation

If you are an American dealing with a damaging search result, you do not have the safety net that European citizens have. That is the honest reality. But it does not mean the problem is unsolvable.

For most Americans, the path forward combines direct publisher outreach with Google’s available removal tools and, when removal is not possible, building stronger content that displaces the negative result in rankings. None of this is automatic. All of it takes effort, and sometimes patience. Most of it works.

The situations that are genuinely difficult involve accurate news articles where the publisher refuses to cooperate and the article ranks high enough to cause ongoing harm. For those cases, content suppression is the most reliable tool. Build stronger positive results that rank above the negative one, and the article loses its reach even if it never comes down. It takes longer than a GDPR request. It works.

For a practical, step-by-step walkthrough of the full removal and suppression process, our guide on how to remove news articles from Google covers all of it, including what to say in a publisher request, how to use Google’s tools, and what a suppression strategy actually looks like in practice.