Google CEO Eric Schmidt cause some disturbance in The Force (aka. The Internet), as he told 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 says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

This caused, amongst other reactions, a clip on The Colbert Report on „The Word - Control-Self-Delete” which comically touches on the rather true topic, that even „surgically altering your appearance and getting rid of old friends” can’t save you from being recognized by Google.

Eric Schmidt even spells it out to the WSJ readers:

„I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” he elaborates. „They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”
 
Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, „we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.

So what could you do with such a wealth of information? Listen to a discussion/talk Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross gave on May 1^st, 2009:

Blip.tv: All-seeing eye from an Open Rights Group event.
The video is also available in .mov and .ogg format.

Mehr dazu erfährt man auch, wenn man Cory Doctorows „Little Brother” liest.

Tagged as: google, internet, privacy, rant | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Freitag, 20100827, 21:17 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)