Forget any 'Right to Be Forgotten'

[Commentary] Privacy viewed in isolation looks more like a right than it does when seen in context. Any regulation to keep personal information confidential quickly runs up against other rights, such as free speech, and many privileges, from free Web search to free email.

There are real trade-offs between privacy and speech. Censorship requires government limits on speech, at odds with the open ethos of the Web. It's also not clear how a right to be forgotten could be enforced. If someone writes facts about himself on Facebook that he later regrets, do we really want the government punishing those who use the information? UCLA law Prof. Eugene Volokh has explained why speech and privacy are often at odds. "The difficulty is that the right to information privacy -- the right to control other people's communication of personally identifiable information about you -- is a right to have the government stop people from speaking about you," he wrote in a law review article in 2000. One of the virtues of competitive markets is that companies vie for customers over everything from services to privacy protections. Regulators have no reason to dictate one right answer to these balancing acts among interests that consumers are fully capable of making for themselves.