Luciano Floridi’s Talk at Santa Clara University

In the polarized debate about the so-called “right to be forgotten” prompted by an important decision issued by the European Court of Justice last year, Luciano Floridi has played a key role. Floridi, who is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford and Director of Research of the Oxford Internet Institute, accepted Google’s invitation to join its advisory council on that topic. While the council was making its way around seven European capitals pursuing both expert and public input, Professor Floridi (the only ethicist in the group) wrote several articles about his evolving understanding of the issues involved—including “Google's privacy ethics tour of Europe: a complex balancing act”; “Google ethics tour: should readers be told a link has been removed?”; “The right to be forgotten – the road ahead”; and “Right to be forgotten poses more questions than answers.”

 

Last month, after the advisory council released its much-anticipated report, Professor Floridi spoke at Santa Clara University (his lecture was part of our ongoing “IT, Ethics, and Law” lecture series). In his talk, titled “Recording, Recalling, Retrieving, Remembering: Memory in the Information Age,” Floridi embedded his analysis of the European court decision into a broader exploration of the nature of memory itself; the role of memory in the European philosophical tradition; and the relationship among memory, identity, forgiveness, and closure. As Floridi explained, the misnamed “right to be forgotten” is really about closure, which is in turn not about forgetting but about “rightly managing your past memory.”

 

Here is the video of that talk. We hope that it will add much-needed context to the more nuanced conversation that is now developing around the balancing of the rights, needs, and responsibilities of all of the stakeholders involved in this debate, as Google continues to process the hundreds of thousands of requests for de-linking submitted so far in the E.U.

 

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