By Jijo Jacob: Subscribe to Jijo's RSS feed
August 18, 2010 10:46 AM EDT
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has warned that people who indiscriminately post personal data and images on the web will someday have to "change their identity".
Saying he didn't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time, the man who holds virtual keys to personal data of millions of people said young people who choose to live their lives in a 'googlable' fish bowl could one day regret.
In an interview to Wall Street Journal, Schmidt said he hoped it would be normal in future when people change their names and identity only to cut off the trails of wanton youth
Schmidt's statement apparently runs counter to the underlying business concept of Google, which is to record everything and make them available to anyone who searches for information.
But interestingly, his comments come exactly five years after Google reportedly blacklisted CNET scribes for publishing personal information about its CEO.
In July 2005, CNET reporter Elinor Mills wrote an article titled "Google balances privacy, reach," which highlighted Google's amassing of mountains of personal data of people who sign up for its services and focused on the privacy concerns emanating from this.
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In order to buttress the point, the author published quite a chunk of interesting personal data on Schmidt, including his wealth, social life, political donations and the like.
The article said the enormous personal data stored under Google's watch could easily become a target "for hackers, zealous government investigators, or even a Google insider who falls short of the company's ethics."
CNET, a major technology news website announced later that Google had blacklisted its journalists for one year.
Now, apparently, Schmidt has come around a full circle.
Saying that Google is trying to define the future of search, Schmidt said, “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type."
He promised Google will help people plan their lives in future as the search engine will have accumulated fathomless amounts of personal data on each person.
That would be a scary thing to happen, but yes, it could really happen.
One basic precept in science is that if something is possible, somebody, some day, will do it. Schmidt might have just expanded on this theme when he said last year, "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Now, according to Schmidt himself, there is a third option: "You can erase your identity."
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