Professor Luciano Floridi is an adviser to Google, but he could unofficially be called the search giant’s Philosopher-in-Chief. A metaphysician who turned his attention to information and privacy in order to address the needs of his age, Floridi is the academic thinker trying to help steer the company through uncharted, ethically choppy waters. From “Google’s Philosopher,” a Pacific-Standard profile by Robert Herritt:

“In 2010, a Spanish lawyer named Mario Costeja González appealed to Spain’s national Data Protection Agency to have an embarrassing auction notice for his repossessed home wiped from a newspaper website and de-indexed from Google’s search results. Because the financial matter had been cleared up years earlier, González argued, the fact that the information continued to accompany searches of his name amounted to a violation of privacy.

The Spanish authorities ruled that the search link should be deleted. In May 2014, the European Court of Justice upheld the Spanish complaint against Google. Since then, Google has received more than 140,000 de-linking requests. Handling these requests in a way that respects both the court and the company’s other commitments requires Google to confront an array of thorny questions. When, for instance, does the public’s right to information trump the personal right to privacy? Should media outlets be consulted in decisions over the de-indexing of news links? When is it in the public interest to deny right-to- be-forgotten requests?

Here’s where the dapper Italian philosopher comes in. Floridi is a professor of philosophy and the ethics of information, and he is the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute. For more than a decade, he has distanced himself from the sort of conventional Anglo-American philosophy that occupied him for much of his early career. Driven by the idea that, as he put it to me, ‘philosophy should talk seamlessly to its time,’ he has set about developing a new approach to his discipline that he calls the philosophy of information. Floridi has described PI, as it is known, as his attempt to provide ‘a satisfactory way of dealing with the new ethical challenges posed by information and communication technologies.’ And, wouldn’t you know it, Google happens to be in the market for just that.

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.

Consider his take on what it means to be a person. For Floridi, you are your information, which comprises everything from data about the relations between particles in your body, to your life story, to your memories, beliefs, and genetic code. By itself, this is a novel answer to the perennial question of personal identity, which has preoccupied philosophers since at least Plato: What defines the self as a coherent entity over time and space? But Floridi’s view can also help us think precisely about the consequential questions that today preoccupy us at a very practical level.”