Majorities of Americans support a US right to be forgotten

Evidence

A national poll conducted by Software Advice found that 61 percent of Americans believe that some version of the right to be forgotten is necessary, 39 percent want a European-style blanket right to be forgotten, and nearly half were concerned that “irrelevant” search results can harm a person’s reputation. A survey by YouGov found that 55 percent of Americans would support legislation similar to the right to be forgotten, compared to only 14 percent who would not. A US survey by Benenson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker published nearly a year after the EU decision found that 88 percent of respondents somewhat (36 percent) or strongly (52 percent) supported a US law that would let them petition companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to remove certain personal information that appears in search results. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1807

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did the Software Advice poll find such different results from typical privacy debates? The 88 percent figure seems strikingly high vs. standard US anti-regulation sentiment.
• XREF: Connects to EU General Data Protection Regulation debates about the right to erasure, a fixture of modern platform-regulation discourse. — connects to: Overwhelming US majorities favor rights-to-be-forgotten style data control — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 188

Broader Connections

• Overwhelming US majorities favor rights-to-be-forgotten style data control #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 188