Kennedy School Archives — LIRNEasia


Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, Associate Professor at Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Massachussetts, has criticised the increasing global tendency for everything on the Web, in telephony and in computing to be recorded, archived and kept forever. He said, “In March 2007, Google confirmed that since its inception it had stored every search query every user ever made and every search result ever clicked on. Like the Soviet state, Google does not forget. Google remembers forever.” He adds, “If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved…our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context…the lack of forgetting may prompt us speak less freely and openly.