Today Eric Schmidt said what had to be one of the most incredibly stupid things a man who helps guide a company who has built its reputation, and massive wealth, around the idea of ‘do no evil’ could possibly say.
It happened in a CNBC interview with Maria Bartiromo and I think it is a sentence that will come back to haunt not just Schmidt but also Google as a whole. The sentence that will be forever etched in the Long Tail of search engines was this:
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Michael Masnick pointed out this sounds suspiciously similar to the anti-privacy arguments being used by law enforcement agencies around the world as they chip away at our rights.
Ryan Tate at Valleywag/Gawker couldn’t pass up the opportunity to point out the delicious irony about how this was the man who had blacklisted CNET for writing a post containing information about Schmidt that they had gotten from Google searches.
The best response though had to be from my friend Alexander van Elsas in his open letter to Schmidt where he asked him to live up to Google’s motto rather than continuing to tarnish it beyond rescue.
Privacy isn’t just about hiding personal information. Privacy is about choice. It’s about freedom. It is about the user that can draw his personal line somewhere in this exchange. It’s about restoring the balance between the user and the service provider. Many hot shot Internet guru’s have told us that privacy is dead. What they are saying is that personal choice and freedom are dead? Do you really believe that? That would be evil.
Personally I think that Schmidt’s statement proves that Google has stepped over that line and the glorious ethos that I think many people who work at the company truly believe in – is dead. All that remains now is the tossing of the dirt on the coffin and the wake where Schmidt and the boys dance a jig on all our privacy.
The really sad part though is that I don’t think the majority of people really care after all all that free stuff is hard to resist – and Google knows it.
Google – a protector of our privacy?
There is no such thing as The Age of Privacy
[...] really not an illusion, we simply do not have privacy online. While Bruce Schneier, Boing Boing and others can all cut deeply into Google’s CEO statement about privacy, the reality is that what we do [...]
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I’d like to ask Eric, “Do you close the door when you pee?” That kind of thinking is what got us where we are, and is going to take us straight to hell. “If you run from the cops, you must be guilty of something.” or “Why would you refuse a drug test unless you’re on drugs?”. Scary, man, scary.
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[...] really not an illusion, we simply do not have privacy online. While Bruce Schneier, Boing Boing and others can all cut deeply into Google’s CEO statement about privacy, the reality is that what we do [...]
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Does Google really steal everyone’s information, or are we all paranoid? Schmidt’s comment may have just been a throwaway statement, a slip of the tongue, a generic response.
Dominic´s last blog ..AD: Memozu Rewrite
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[...] really not an illusion, we simply do not have privacy online. While Bruce Schneier, Boing Boing and others can all cut deeply into Google’s CEO statement about privacy, the reality is that what we do [...]
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