The Right to Oblivion | An Interview with Lowry Pressly on Privacy, Secrecy, and Online Lives

And the value of spontaneity, the voluntary surveillance society, and more.

I have been interested in privacy as a concept for well over a decade. It is something I value tremendously despite the fact that I choose to live my life in public. Yet, articulating the value of privacy and the proper moral norms for privacy has proven incredibly difficult. I never saw how to make philosophical sense of it.

Lowry Pressly, a lecturer at Stanford in the Department of Political Science, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and the Stanford Civics Initiative, has done a much better job of it. His book The Right to Oblivion is the best work on privacy I have read to date. (The New Yorker named it one of the best books of 2024, so my assessment seems to be shared.)

I asked Lowry to join me for a conversation about his book. It’s a good time, and I think you’ll enjoy it.