Google CEO Eric Schmidt slams on privacy
Just recently Googles CEO Eric Schmidt said something that blew away peoples confidence in Googles privacy ethics.
Eric Schmidt said the following in an interview with CNBC.
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
What he said is essentially what every police state and totalitarian regime has said concerning privacy. Its shocking that he, being the CEO of Google has such a basic understanding of privacy. Privacy is fundamentally important to being a free individual.
The hypocrisy in all this is that according to the EFF “Schmidt blacklisted CNET reporters from Google after the tech news company published an article with information about his salary, neighborhood, hobbies, and political donations — all obtained from Google searches.”
If you lose privacy, you lose your individuality because instead of being unique individuals with private lives you become a data farm. Its not about your privacy as one person but the combined privacy of everyone, its what makes us unique. If you could have access to all my data ever, big deal, you wouldn’t get much out of it… But if you have access to all my data and everyone elses combined, you now have allot of power to do evil, such things like insider trading would be a good example. If a company like Google could search all your emails and everyone elses then they could literally have an inside view at the stock market, when to buy or sell based on insider emails.
Privacy is a big deal, its important and if we lose privacy on the internet then we give up our individual identities.
Here is a link to the CNBC interview: CNBC Link
If you want to read more, PCWord did a great job covering it. PCWord Link
The EFF also did a good job covering it. EFF Link