Imagine being able to store all your memories, your dreams and basically record your whole life on a device which works as an external hard drive. This may sound like something which you could read in a fantasy book, yet multiple projects have been set up where the initiative has been taken to create such a thing.

A computer engineer from Microsoft Corp. is on the way to create a searchable database in which digitalised information about somebody’s life can be stored. His research project is called MyLifeBits, and at this point he is basically gathering information from different aspects in his life – photographs, bills, home movies and audio recordings. His ultimate goal is to create a mechanism which is able to ‘remember’ everything – but will this be useful in any way? Of course, it will be handy to store all the study material which you have come across and be able to access it without having to stress your own brain, but in many ways memory cannot be digitalized (at least not with the technology available now).

A more rational approach is that of a doctoral student in the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is working on a device which could be used for people with memory loss. His idea is the more or less the same as that of Microsoft, yet on a smaller scale -  a wireless device, kind of like a smart phone with internet possibilities, which can be carried around and will record conversations and send the data back to a computer. However, the downside of this memory aid would be that it will not be able to support memory problems that include physical items, such as keys.

These ideas might seem like the next application available for your personal smart phone, however the aspect of privacy is of great concern to a number of critics. Anything which would be said in a conversation is translated into a digital file, making it easy for anyone to find out what a person has been doing, saying and seeing. Even of greater concern is it to the person who is not carrying the device around themselves (given that they realize they do, that is), but to people in his or her surroundings – those who do not know everything they say is being recorded immediately. The founders of these research projects claim to be aware of the privacy issue, and agree that a lot has to be researched on before being able to safely release these products on the market.