Google’s Philosopher: Tech and the Nature of Identity - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society
►http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/googles-philosopher-technology-nature-identity-court-legal-policy-95456
Although difficult to summarize, Floridi’s program comes down to this: For anyone who wants to address the problems raised by digital technologies, the best way to understand the world is to look at everything that exists—a country, a corporation, a billboard—as constituted fundamentally by information. By viewing reality in these terms, Floridi believes, one can simultaneously shed light on age-old debates and provide useful answers to contemporary problems.
Now that the mining and manipulation of personal information has spread to almost all aspects of life, for instance, one of the most common such questions is, “Who owns your data?” According to Floridi, it’s a misguided query. Your personal information, he argues, should be considered as much a part of you as, say, your left arm. “Anything done to your information,” he has written, “is done to you, not to your belongings.” Identity theft and invasions of privacy thus become more akin to kidnapping than stealing or trespassing. Informational privacy is “a fundamental and inalienable right,” he argues, one that can’t be overridden by concerns about national security, say, or public safety. “Any society (even a utopian one) in which no informational privacy is possible,” he has written, “is one in which no personal identity can be maintained.”
Ceci nous mène tout droit aux justifications ultimes du cyberlibertarianisme
the development of advanced information and communication technologies has revealed that we are, as he has put it, “interconnected informational organisms … sharing with biological agents and engineered artifacts a global environment ultimately made of information.” Refrigerators, fruit flies, websites, human beings: We all exist together in what Floridi calls the infosphere—an ecosystem that a company like Google has significant power to shape.
Much of Floridi’s work is motivated by the idea that in choosing the rules that govern the flow and control of information, we are constructing a new environment in which future generations will live. It won’t be enough, he has written, to adopt “small, incremental changes in old conceptual frameworks.” The situation demands entirely new ways of thinking about technology, privacy, the law, ethics, and, indeed, the nature of personhood itself.