Imagine your 18-year-old daughter is decapitated in a car accident. Gruesome police photographs of her body are leaked onto the Internet. Every time someone searches your family’s name, the photos pop up at the top of the page. That’s what happened to Christos and Lesli Catsouras because in the United States, unlike in Europe, search engines are not required to act on requests by individuals to remove such links.

That’s why our nonprofit consumer group has petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to grant every American “the right to be forgotten,” a position The Post criticized in an Aug. 28 editorial, “Stifling the Internet,” for potentially opening the door to the purging of “unflattering” links upon request. We believe that families such as the Catsourases should have the right to ask the Internet’s corporate gatekeepers to stop elevating deeply disturbing, unauthorized, irrelevant, excessive or distorted personal information to the top of search results associated with their names.

Extending the right to be forgotten to Americans would not mean that government would limit freedom of expression, as The Post suggested. True suppression of speech happens when a government reviews all media and suppresses those parts it deems objectionable on moral, political, military or other grounds. With a right to be forgotten, Google, Yahoo and other corporations — not the government — would decide what material should not be provided in response to search requests, while the material would still remain on any Web sites that posted it.