Eric Schmidt: On Social Networking and Privacy

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Eric Schmidt: On Social Networking and Privacy

engine

3:35 pm on Aug 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

Eric Schmidt: On Social Networking and Privacy [bbc.co.uk]

Young people may one day have to change their names in order to escape their previous online activity, Google boss Eric Schmidt has warned.

Mr Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal he feared they did not understand the consequences of having so much personal information about them online.

On his prediction that people may change their names, Mr Schmidt said: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time... I mean we really have to think about these things as a society."

However, Mr Schmidt said that Google would likely store more personal information about its users in the future.

That last line above just tells us what we already know.

Reno

5:43 pm on Aug 19, 2010 (gmt 0)

Mr Schmidt said that Google would likely store more personal information about its users in the future.

The core question for me is this: What will they store, and more importantly, what will they disclose?

After all, Google is a search engine whose primary purpose is to fulfill queries.

So if someone is looking to find out about Wilbur Widget and Google has "more personal information" stored away in its data centers, how much of that will they access in their response to the query? If something comes up that is detrimental to Mr Widget, can he do anything about it? Where is the line?

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BeeDeeDubbleU

8:34 am on Aug 20, 2010 (gmt 0)

I cannot believe that Schmidt is shooting himself in the foot like this. All he is doing is further highlighting the privacy issues that are dogging Google at the moment. Does he have an agenda?