Thread: Google on privacy: change your name

Louisa Hearn
August 17, 2010

Google's chief has put forth a novel solution for today's teenagers whose wild online antics threaten to follow them into their adult life: change your name.

His comments come as the search giant attempts to allay public concern about plans to commercialise its ever-increasing pile of data. Schmidt's prediction for those wanting to distance themselves from their past came as part of a broad-based internet discussion with the Wall Street Journal.

"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he said, as he predicted that all young people might one day be entitled to change their names in order to disown compromising activities captured on friends' social media sites.

This is the not the first time Google's chief has weighed in on the privacy debate. He was once quoted as saying: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

The debate, however, has shifted to vulnerable groups like teens, who many fear will be unfairly penalised for youthful follies when they enter the adult world.

Schmidt predicts that a culture of recommendation will soon take over from search engines, with location-based services combining with users' personal interests and needs to suggest a particular path of action.

‘‘One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. . . I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he told the WSJ. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

In spite of the social danger to young people, Schmidt argues against regulation of the internet on the basis that users would surely protest against Google doing anything "creepy" with their data.

But even if Google chooses not to exploit its position of trust, privacy campaigners warn there are plenty of others prepared to have a crack at mining all the public available information for commercial gain, meaning there are no easy answers for the company that once vowed to “do no evil”.

Market researcher, Hitwise, said Google accounted for 93.5 per cent of the Australian search market over the past month, and a vast store of personal information also exists in social applications like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

Money lenders, employers, landlords and insurance companies are examples of organisations that might benefit from personal profiles of potential customers, according to privacy campaigners who say once photographs or other compromising data appears online, it becomes almost impossible to remove.

According to the WSJ, a data-trading marketplace could gather personal information from numerous sources, including Google, and offer highly personalised tracking of individuals.

“Tiny companies like BlueKai and eXelate Media already offer some of these services, pressuring Google to match them,” it said.

Fun Facebook photos may one day come back to haunt social media users.

According to Read Write Web blog, Schmidt had this to say at a recent conference: "Show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos! People will find it's very useful to have devices that remember what you want to do, because you forgot...But society isn't ready for questions that will be raised as result of user-generated content."

Source: google, privacy, change your name

They'd probably find 14 pics of my arse never mind the rest.

So, what would you change your name to?

Thats a good idea, problem (mostly) solved.

Ah, yes. Worldviews according to Google. We needn't wait too very long, as Google has set out to rule our existences in every which manner.....unwittingly.