He's not creepy, just honest. He knows in the future what we call "privacy" won't exist anymore. Every new innovation gets regulated by the government so that politicians get their cut. Right now we're seeing them redefine "privacy" to mean privacy from anyone other than this corporate/government partnership knowing everything about you. This is what he's talking about -- and it IS inevitable.
Here's the real privacy question: will you be able to keep other PEOPLE from knowing everything about you? I've contributed recently to speakerwiki.org -- they are building a massive database of every public/tech/motivational speaker in the world. Rated and Ranked. So what happens when everyone has a Yelp profile that they don't control? Or do corporate/political interests prevent this from ever happening to control their monopoly on data? To me that's the real privacy question for the next 5-10 years.
There's a certain branch of honesty that's intensely creepy. It happens when someone is oblivious to the emotions of the people around them, and it's generally characterized by consistently being far too blunt, or dismissively laughing at something that frightens everybody else. Communication is as much about the emotion conveyed as the actual words. If Schmidt thinks it's just a matter of time before it will be the norm to ditch your identity for fear of embarrassment, he's creepy. He's especially creepy because he's dedicated himself to creating the technology that will force temporary identities.
The following scene was described in the fortune magazine article:
“All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?”
A room full of tech journalists cheering and applauding a tech CEO for saying that he's the best person to know everything about everyone is about as creepy as it gets. It sounds like a work of fiction deliberately crafted to be creepy. But Schmidt is insensitive to how most people feel about privacy. He just thinks he escaped a tough question with a clever one-liner.
The tech lobby isn't the strongest lobby in the world, but the consumer rights lobby, ACLU et al are even weaker. Given the state of congress, no way any new legislation passes, it'll be "big government usurping the market" and get filibustered or some such. Democrats won't do anything to make it happen and Republicans will outright oppose it on the off-chance that they do.
So we'll see the industry definition of acceptable creep outwards. It's driven by the fundamentals. Nobody puts vague notions of consumer privacy above feeding their kids.
EDIT: Does this have to get downmodded? Nothing in the post is controversial, and it's not exactly news that Congress has a hard time passing bills these days.
Nonsense. That's not something anyone can "know". It's something we decide. It's puzzling that anyone would take it seriously when people like Google or Facebook claim to simply adapt to inevitable societal changes when they have very clear vested interests in a particular outcome.
These changes are going to lead to huge disasters and Messrs. Schmidt and Zuckerberg will look like the bosses of Lehman and the Fed claiming that markets always price risk correctly. The privacy thing will crash badly.
As a shareholder of Google I will work towards getting Mr. Schmidt fired.
I found "I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.", a lot more creepy than the statements about privacy.
I'm not so worried about what they know about me, but I am very concerned that Schmidt thinks Google should try to tell me what to do next.
Gruber misinterprets what Schmidt said. He was making a prediction, not a prescription, regarding future social behavior -- young people changing their name as they come of age.
Ten years ago, would anyone have predicted that today we would be able to have online friendships with 1000 people whom we have never met (Facebook), know what they had for lunch (Twitter), see photos from their vacation (Flickr), know their exact location at this moment (Gowalla), what items they have just bought (Blippy), etc. None of this has anything to do with Google or how "creepy" Schmidt is. It seems to me a prescient forecast.
He also takes the "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." quote out of context, as so many did at the time. Schmidt was pointing out that the government can demand access to data about your searches, and that you need to be conscious of that and be careful.
Between two misinterpretations and quoting a 'quip' to imply that google somehow things it should make all your decisions for you, it is a pretty shoddy post.
Maybe it's prescient if it came from you and me. But if it comes from the CEO of one of the companies that has never seem to care much about privacy it's another matter. They _can_ do thing, change them. It seems to me that Schmidt has not problem with such a future, and that's creepy.
There is no reason why Twitter, Gowalla, and the rest could not have good privacy settings. But that would be horrible for Schmidt since he makes money from knowing what you like or what you may like (and you don't even know it yet).
...unless you're violating the privacy of a police officer, prominent businessman, or a politician. In that case, you'd better be ready to fight a felony wiretapping charge.
Gruber loses it on the facts here. <em>On the other, the Schmidt Google that, in its efforts to serve ads as efficiently as possible, no longer seems concerned with the traditional Western concept of personal privacy.</em> For search ads, nothing matters except your query. It's just contextual -- it doesn't matter who you are, what you've searched on before or if you have a Gmail account.
Now, with Adsense and DoubleClick, Google is starting to play with using more about what it knows about you, but so far, the system only uses traditional third-party tracking cookies AND some data about what you do on YouTube. There's substantial pressure inside the company to break down this wall further (see the recent WSJ article on the leaked docusments), but right now, it's hard to see where Google is "no longer concerned with the traditional Western notion of personal privacy."
Other than that, it's a great troll on Gruber's part.
The more I read about Schmidt the more I think he's soon to be replaced by Larry or Sergey as CEO.
The guy has a knack for putting his foot in his mouth in interviews, and he's been publicly identified as the guy who wanted to stay in China, wanted to abandon Net Neutrality, and who made a few gaffes in reference to the captured wifi network info, etc.
Schmidt is also the face of Google in Washington DC, and has led the Company's efforts to innovate via legislation. He is also very tight with the Obama campaign and campaigned overtly, which is not (in my opinion) an appropriate thing for a CEO to do.
In a lot of ways, his instincts clash with the values that Larry and Sergey seem to be trying very hard to perserve... My prediction is one more gaffe, particularly one accompanied by a stock price dip and he's out.
If you were a shareholder, would you rather want your company to be controlled by a shark, who pursue profits vigourosly at the cost of the occasional PR failure (that doesn't really seem to affect them in any real term). Or would you want it to be controlled by two geeks that started their company with the motto: "Don't be evil" and would put (I imagine) ethics before profit?
But is there any real reason to believe that Schmidt's view of how things will be in NOT shared by google as a company (or even Sergey and Larry)? Perhaps that is precisely what google wants to achieve?
There's definitely some truth to this, but it has more than a hint of the old trope that "the king is virtuous, but misled by wicked advisors".
If Larry and Sergey have a problem with Google's actions or Schmidt's channeling of Larry Ellison in interviews, no one is in a better place to know or do something about it.
the old trope that "the king is virtuous, but misled by wicked advisors"
That's very well put and I recognize the pattern, but never thought of it this way before. Is this something you figured out from observation, or did you learn it from some source (and if so, what)?
[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.
Does this really seem so hard to believe?
I'm one of the developers for a certain popular online video game. One time, I posted my personal email to the game's forums... it was along the lines of "If you happen to reproduce [certain really hard to reproduce problem], please type [console command] and send the results to [email address]". That kind of thing.
Well, one of the fans managed to trace my name -> my email -> my Hacker News profile -> my hacker news comments, then started copy-pasting random things I had written from HN to the game's IRC channel. I didn't really mind... it was just very weird.
But what if I were in an alternate reality, and I had said some really insane things on my HN account, like, say, C/C++ really isn't that terrible? You know, something absolutely crazy. Then an employer traced my name -> my email -> my Hacker News profile -> my insane comments. Now a potential employer has another data point about whether to hire me, one that I didn't necessarily want him to have.
So I can see why it would potentially it would potentially be very useful to have a mechanism to very easily legally change your name. I've never looked into how to do that, since I have no reason to, but I assume it's probably difficult, or doesn't catch everything, or causes you headaches down the road, etc.
>Recall, for example, this comment of Schmidt’s from 2009, regarding Google and privacy: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."
It's ironic that Schmidt's quote is taken completely out of context, & will follow him around for years if not decades to come. Maybe he should change his name.
It's sad that "press" or bloggers like Gruber either can't read or go for sensationalist angle and crucify someone based on benign remarks taken out of context.
It's sad that supposedly intelligent audience like HN falls for it and instead of ignoring it altogether or discussing when Gruber became full of shit, we're actually discussing his post as if what he wrote actually had merit.
But that's not Schmidt's fault. It's all on Gruber.
What is ironic is that you actually said the thing that Schmidt didn't. Per Gruber that makes you a creep.
It's hard to take Gruber seriously because of his bias towards Apple. Gruber is concerned about things Schmidt says, yet not about what Apple does, i.e. creating a device that logs everything you type, takes pictures of you without you knowing it, etc.
Indeed, he always writes with a bias towards Apple and against competitors of Apple, which of course makes him very popular with the Apple fanboy crowd.
That is one of the reasons I never pay a lot of attention to these kind of posts.
Besides that, I may hope my iPhone does not do such thing as you say (at least not sending the information to Apple), otherwise Apple can expect a lot of legal trouble, I guess... ;-)
My main gripe with Schmidt (in the way he is presented in the interview[^1]) is how casual he is about all the problems. You almost hear Steve Jobs's voice: "Change your name. Not that big of a deal".
I don't know what goes on in Schmidt's head, and maybe he is as upset about the predicament of today's youth with the vociferous cornucopia of information most people leave behind. Maybe he has come to terms with these reservations at some point, which is why we hear no lament, no reprehensions, no fear and expressed personal(!) feelings.
Nevertheless, he comes across as creepy because of this, be it as an automaton, a corporate CEO, or someone who knows that he at the very least wields the key to the cogs and gears of most of the information-aggregating monster - keeping himself out of harm's way.
I don't get a single vibe from him signalling that he finds the development troubling and at the very least wants to try to ameliorate the situation and development - as a private person and a corporate entity with a lot of influence. He seems to be welcoming the development. At the very least, if he has an moral fibre of independence, he is accepting it, and if he's indifferent, he's acquiescent.
The last person who casually declared privacy dead was Mark Zuckerberg. Go figure.
[1]: I want to emphasize this, because the structure of the article leaves no wiggle room for context and elaboration, which leaves Schmidt with the benefit of the doubt. And so I do. But Google is doing a [expletive] job at managing, building and recovering PR and brand value at the moment.
And the mindset construed from the article lends itself to the recent hubbub of Google's moral qualms of how far they should go to monetize and foster more ad revenue.
David Brin, author of The Transparent Society [1], should do a 1-hour sit-down interview with Eric Schmidt. I'm sure it'd generate dozens of scary-but-true quotes for the blogosphere and social-news sites to wring their hands over.
but at least our government answers to its citizens through elections.
Haha. I agree with him that Schmidt is out of touch but still I trust Google's discretion over that of Congress. If Google missteps everyone cries bloody-murder and it can affect their profits and future projects. Congress systematically abuses power and profits from it.
"[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites."
Or maybe people will just adapt, as people tend to do, and learn to more actively manage their online identities, and selectively upload and monitor information about themselves and their friends online.
Or maybe some intrepid hackers will see this as a problem and solve it with some technology that puts control of our own data directly in our hands, perhaps One Social Web or Diaspora.
Schmidt's prediction doesn't make him sound creepy to me. It makes him sound like a dinosaur. I can't imagine a more kludgey, un-Google-like solution to this problem than people changing their names when they reach 'adulthood', whenever that is (18? 21? 25? 29? 30? 35?).
Especially with rapidly advancing facial recognition technology and information theory, changing your name will do exactly nothing for you in this regard.
Rather I would expect the CEO of Google, the company that seemed to popularize finding clever technical solutions to every problem, to have predicted something more along those lines. What's going on guys?
Edit: now that I reread this, it strikes me that maybe Schmidt didn't put much thought into this prediction and didn't much care to. He's just using an outlandish idea to draw attention to an interesting social problem. Who knows.
[Schmidt] predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.
I'm going to propose something more specific if you want online anonymity. Change your name (or keep this in mind for your future child), both first and last, to something pretty common that suits your taste. When people google you, they'll get so many results of different people with the same name that you'll have anonymity through numbers.
Here is something to help you out, though I'm not sure how good of a tool it is: http://namestatistics.com/
Whenever I google my name, I can never find myself having to sift through hundreds of different people with the same first and last name.
>Fortune magazine recently called Google a "cash cow" and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.
I think any creator worth his salt would hate this line of thinking. The premise that since Google is sitting on pile of Cash and should pay large of chunks it as dividends rather than spending it on "next big thing" is ridiculous. Apple hasn't paid cash dividend since 1995 (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL+Key+Statistics). Well it was so steeped in bad journalism, I couldn't finish it.
Coming to Gruber's article, first - why get personal? And none can deny that Google (or Facebook) wield tremendous power by keeping so much of personal data, but seriously what alternatives he proposes? I can't go back to stone age. Anyone who asks Google, "oh-but you keep so much of our data?" is basically asking a rhetorical question. Personally, I am not afraid. If Mr. Gruber got better ideas if not 'internet', I am all ears.
Seriously? Look, people several time came up with alternatives.
EU gov: "erase your data after 6 months"
Google (after a lot of opposition): "fine, we'll erase them after 2 years"
Everyone: "you can't just make me use buzz without me having a say"
Schmidt (and I am paraphrasing): "Geez, users are stupid!"
The reason why Schmidt sees no alternatives is because he doesn't want to look for alternatives. They are there. But as the guy with the biggest vault he has all to lose.
I think that many of Schmidt's comments might be unnecessarily frank (from Google's perspective).
I'm glad he is making these comments because it helps more people understand the privacy issues that they're dealing with. So to that extent, I applaud Schmidt though I'm not sure why he is making all of these comments.It seems like his honesty/candidness (or is it arrogance) is hurting Google.
Anyone who bought that "Don't be evil" could be a legitimate mission statement for one of the most powerful companies in the world is kidding themselves.
Evil is quite relative, especially when billions of dollars are involved.
Google (and Facebook) should be held to a higher standard since there has been no company in human history that knows (or has the potential to know) so much personal information.
The speed with which people rush to discredit that slogan says more about the degree to which it threatens them than it does about Google's adherence to it, IMO.
I see "don't be evil" as Google signalling that they were playing a long-term strategy rather than short-term one. When that "motto" came about in the early 2000s, the web experience was crap because so many companies were trying to cash in for short-term gain. Instead, Google eschewed short-term profits to be in a better place down the road (and look where it got them verses, say, AltaVista). It's not that Google is benevolent per se, but that by concerning themselves with the long term, a nice side-effect is that users are happier.
[+] [-] oldgregg|15 years ago|reply
Here's the real privacy question: will you be able to keep other PEOPLE from knowing everything about you? I've contributed recently to speakerwiki.org -- they are building a massive database of every public/tech/motivational speaker in the world. Rated and Ranked. So what happens when everyone has a Yelp profile that they don't control? Or do corporate/political interests prevent this from ever happening to control their monopoly on data? To me that's the real privacy question for the next 5-10 years.
On second thought, he is pretty creepy.
[+] [-] ccc3|15 years ago|reply
There's a certain branch of honesty that's intensely creepy. It happens when someone is oblivious to the emotions of the people around them, and it's generally characterized by consistently being far too blunt, or dismissively laughing at something that frightens everybody else. Communication is as much about the emotion conveyed as the actual words. If Schmidt thinks it's just a matter of time before it will be the norm to ditch your identity for fear of embarrassment, he's creepy. He's especially creepy because he's dedicated himself to creating the technology that will force temporary identities.
The following scene was described in the fortune magazine article:
“All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?”
A room full of tech journalists cheering and applauding a tech CEO for saying that he's the best person to know everything about everyone is about as creepy as it gets. It sounds like a work of fiction deliberately crafted to be creepy. But Schmidt is insensitive to how most people feel about privacy. He just thinks he escaped a tough question with a clever one-liner.
[+] [-] jbooth|15 years ago|reply
The tech lobby isn't the strongest lobby in the world, but the consumer rights lobby, ACLU et al are even weaker. Given the state of congress, no way any new legislation passes, it'll be "big government usurping the market" and get filibustered or some such. Democrats won't do anything to make it happen and Republicans will outright oppose it on the off-chance that they do.
So we'll see the industry definition of acceptable creep outwards. It's driven by the fundamentals. Nobody puts vague notions of consumer privacy above feeding their kids.
EDIT: Does this have to get downmodded? Nothing in the post is controversial, and it's not exactly news that Congress has a hard time passing bills these days.
[+] [-] fauigerzigerk|15 years ago|reply
These changes are going to lead to huge disasters and Messrs. Schmidt and Zuckerberg will look like the bosses of Lehman and the Fed claiming that markets always price risk correctly. The privacy thing will crash badly.
As a shareholder of Google I will work towards getting Mr. Schmidt fired.
[+] [-] rbarooah|15 years ago|reply
I'm not so worried about what they know about me, but I am very concerned that Schmidt thinks Google should try to tell me what to do next.
[+] [-] TotlolRon|15 years ago|reply
Maybe he is creepy AND honest? Possible?
[+] [-] GrandMasterBirt|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rayval|15 years ago|reply
Ten years ago, would anyone have predicted that today we would be able to have online friendships with 1000 people whom we have never met (Facebook), know what they had for lunch (Twitter), see photos from their vacation (Flickr), know their exact location at this moment (Gowalla), what items they have just bought (Blippy), etc. None of this has anything to do with Google or how "creepy" Schmidt is. It seems to me a prescient forecast.
[+] [-] ible|15 years ago|reply
Between two misinterpretations and quoting a 'quip' to imply that google somehow things it should make all your decisions for you, it is a pretty shoddy post.
[+] [-] nanairo|15 years ago|reply
There is no reason why Twitter, Gowalla, and the rest could not have good privacy settings. But that would be horrible for Schmidt since he makes money from knowing what you like or what you may like (and you don't even know it yet).
[+] [-] mchouza|15 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
[+] [-] gamble|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaostheory|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsingel|15 years ago|reply
Now, with Adsense and DoubleClick, Google is starting to play with using more about what it knows about you, but so far, the system only uses traditional third-party tracking cookies AND some data about what you do on YouTube. There's substantial pressure inside the company to break down this wall further (see the recent WSJ article on the leaked docusments), but right now, it's hard to see where Google is "no longer concerned with the traditional Western notion of personal privacy."
Other than that, it's a great troll on Gruber's part.
[+] [-] grandalf|15 years ago|reply
The guy has a knack for putting his foot in his mouth in interviews, and he's been publicly identified as the guy who wanted to stay in China, wanted to abandon Net Neutrality, and who made a few gaffes in reference to the captured wifi network info, etc.
Schmidt is also the face of Google in Washington DC, and has led the Company's efforts to innovate via legislation. He is also very tight with the Obama campaign and campaigned overtly, which is not (in my opinion) an appropriate thing for a CEO to do.
In a lot of ways, his instincts clash with the values that Larry and Sergey seem to be trying very hard to perserve... My prediction is one more gaffe, particularly one accompanied by a stock price dip and he's out.
[+] [-] nanairo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadowfox|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gamble|15 years ago|reply
If Larry and Sergey have a problem with Google's actions or Schmidt's channeling of Larry Ellison in interviews, no one is in a better place to know or do something about it.
[+] [-] gruseom|15 years ago|reply
That's very well put and I recognize the pattern, but never thought of it this way before. Is this something you figured out from observation, or did you learn it from some source (and if so, what)?
[+] [-] palish|15 years ago|reply
Does this really seem so hard to believe?
I'm one of the developers for a certain popular online video game. One time, I posted my personal email to the game's forums... it was along the lines of "If you happen to reproduce [certain really hard to reproduce problem], please type [console command] and send the results to [email address]". That kind of thing.
Well, one of the fans managed to trace my name -> my email -> my Hacker News profile -> my hacker news comments, then started copy-pasting random things I had written from HN to the game's IRC channel. I didn't really mind... it was just very weird.
But what if I were in an alternate reality, and I had said some really insane things on my HN account, like, say, C/C++ really isn't that terrible? You know, something absolutely crazy. Then an employer traced my name -> my email -> my Hacker News profile -> my insane comments. Now a potential employer has another data point about whether to hire me, one that I didn't necessarily want him to have.
So I can see why it would potentially it would potentially be very useful to have a mechanism to very easily legally change your name. I've never looked into how to do that, since I have no reason to, but I assume it's probably difficult, or doesn't catch everything, or causes you headaches down the road, etc.
[+] [-] Herring|15 years ago|reply
It's ironic that Schmidt's quote is taken completely out of context, & will follow him around for years if not decades to come. Maybe he should change his name.
[+] [-] kjksf|15 years ago|reply
It's sad that "press" or bloggers like Gruber either can't read or go for sensationalist angle and crucify someone based on benign remarks taken out of context.
It's sad that supposedly intelligent audience like HN falls for it and instead of ignoring it altogether or discussing when Gruber became full of shit, we're actually discussing his post as if what he wrote actually had merit.
But that's not Schmidt's fault. It's all on Gruber.
What is ironic is that you actually said the thing that Schmidt didn't. Per Gruber that makes you a creep.
[+] [-] rue|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcantelon|15 years ago|reply
http://bit.ly/9Gox6U
[+] [-] Anechoic|15 years ago|reply
The article you linked to supports neither of those accusations.
[+] [-] tlammens|15 years ago|reply
Besides that, I may hope my iPhone does not do such thing as you say (at least not sending the information to Apple), otherwise Apple can expect a lot of legal trouble, I guess... ;-)
[+] [-] jbjohns|15 years ago|reply
Do you have anything to comment on the article?
[+] [-] kmfrk|15 years ago|reply
I don't know what goes on in Schmidt's head, and maybe he is as upset about the predicament of today's youth with the vociferous cornucopia of information most people leave behind. Maybe he has come to terms with these reservations at some point, which is why we hear no lament, no reprehensions, no fear and expressed personal(!) feelings.
Nevertheless, he comes across as creepy because of this, be it as an automaton, a corporate CEO, or someone who knows that he at the very least wields the key to the cogs and gears of most of the information-aggregating monster - keeping himself out of harm's way.
I don't get a single vibe from him signalling that he finds the development troubling and at the very least wants to try to ameliorate the situation and development - as a private person and a corporate entity with a lot of influence. He seems to be welcoming the development. At the very least, if he has an moral fibre of independence, he is accepting it, and if he's indifferent, he's acquiescent.
The last person who casually declared privacy dead was Mark Zuckerberg. Go figure.
[1]: I want to emphasize this, because the structure of the article leaves no wiggle room for context and elaboration, which leaves Schmidt with the benefit of the doubt. And so I do. But Google is doing a [expletive] job at managing, building and recovering PR and brand value at the moment.
And the mindset construed from the article lends itself to the recent hubbub of Google's moral qualms of how far they should go to monetize and foster more ad revenue.
[+] [-] gojomo|15 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
[+] [-] naner|15 years ago|reply
Haha. I agree with him that Schmidt is out of touch but still I trust Google's discretion over that of Congress. If Google missteps everyone cries bloody-murder and it can affect their profits and future projects. Congress systematically abuses power and profits from it.
It is a matter of incentives and culture.
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|15 years ago|reply
Or maybe people will just adapt, as people tend to do, and learn to more actively manage their online identities, and selectively upload and monitor information about themselves and their friends online.
Or maybe some intrepid hackers will see this as a problem and solve it with some technology that puts control of our own data directly in our hands, perhaps One Social Web or Diaspora.
Schmidt's prediction doesn't make him sound creepy to me. It makes him sound like a dinosaur. I can't imagine a more kludgey, un-Google-like solution to this problem than people changing their names when they reach 'adulthood', whenever that is (18? 21? 25? 29? 30? 35?).
Especially with rapidly advancing facial recognition technology and information theory, changing your name will do exactly nothing for you in this regard.
Rather I would expect the CEO of Google, the company that seemed to popularize finding clever technical solutions to every problem, to have predicted something more along those lines. What's going on guys?
Edit: now that I reread this, it strikes me that maybe Schmidt didn't put much thought into this prediction and didn't much care to. He's just using an outlandish idea to draw attention to an interesting social problem. Who knows.
[+] [-] madair|15 years ago|reply
Creepy is not an objective word, making this article by definition Ad Hominem.
[+] [-] mjterave|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaostheory|15 years ago|reply
I'm going to propose something more specific if you want online anonymity. Change your name (or keep this in mind for your future child), both first and last, to something pretty common that suits your taste. When people google you, they'll get so many results of different people with the same name that you'll have anonymity through numbers.
Here is something to help you out, though I'm not sure how good of a tool it is: http://namestatistics.com/
Whenever I google my name, I can never find myself having to sift through hundreds of different people with the same first and last name.
[+] [-] sk_0919|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nanairo|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgman|15 years ago|reply
"Anyone can adopt "Don't be evil." The catch is that people will hold you to it."
[+] [-] gnufied|15 years ago|reply
>Fortune magazine recently called Google a "cash cow" and suggested more attention be paid to milking it rather than running off in search of the next big thing.
I think any creator worth his salt would hate this line of thinking. The premise that since Google is sitting on pile of Cash and should pay large of chunks it as dividends rather than spending it on "next big thing" is ridiculous. Apple hasn't paid cash dividend since 1995 (http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=AAPL+Key+Statistics). Well it was so steeped in bad journalism, I couldn't finish it.
Coming to Gruber's article, first - why get personal? And none can deny that Google (or Facebook) wield tremendous power by keeping so much of personal data, but seriously what alternatives he proposes? I can't go back to stone age. Anyone who asks Google, "oh-but you keep so much of our data?" is basically asking a rhetorical question. Personally, I am not afraid. If Mr. Gruber got better ideas if not 'internet', I am all ears.
[+] [-] nanairo|15 years ago|reply
EU gov: "erase your data after 6 months" Google (after a lot of opposition): "fine, we'll erase them after 2 years"
Everyone: "you can't just make me use buzz without me having a say" Schmidt (and I am paraphrasing): "Geez, users are stupid!"
The reason why Schmidt sees no alternatives is because he doesn't want to look for alternatives. They are there. But as the guy with the biggest vault he has all to lose.
[+] [-] kareemm|15 years ago|reply
Um, delete the data instead of keeping it?
[+] [-] credo|15 years ago|reply
I'm glad he is making these comments because it helps more people understand the privacy issues that they're dealing with. So to that extent, I applaud Schmidt though I'm not sure why he is making all of these comments.It seems like his honesty/candidness (or is it arrogance) is hurting Google.
[+] [-] bmalicoat|15 years ago|reply
Evil is quite relative, especially when billions of dollars are involved.
Google (and Facebook) should be held to a higher standard since there has been no company in human history that knows (or has the potential to know) so much personal information.
[+] [-] cageface|15 years ago|reply
Also, Gruber attack-dogging Google? Shocking!
[+] [-] paulgb|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 5teev|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ashishbharthi|15 years ago|reply