“Do I Have the Right to be Forgotten?”
Professor Viktor Mayer Schönberger was featured in a BBC Radio 4 documentary this evening entitled “Do I Have the Right to be Forgotten?” In the program exploring the digital footprints that ordinary individuals establish over time, he explained that large companies such as Google collect all the search queries we ever type. Having this ever growing tranche of data about us stored digitally, we fail to have the ability to forget, and in turn lose a great deal of freedom – ironically the very freedom that newspapers and search engines claim to be protecting. Digital memory gives those who have control over digital images of us the power to manage our history.