

Creepy things Eric Schmidt has said - wensing
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20101025/schmidt-dont-like-google-street-view-photographing-your-house-then-move/

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haberman
Anti-creepy things that Eric Schmidt has said, but don't get press:

Q: How does Google think generally about leveraging user data, both to better
target ads and how to stay competitive with those like Facebook and Microsoft
and Yahoo that are leveraging data possibly more so than what Google is today?
And I think this is particularly relevant for using search data for your
display business but, would love to get your thoughts on that.

Eric Schmidt: "We have a pretty strong opinion that we're not going to do very
much of it. The reason is that we take our end-user data privacy incredibly
seriously and the trust that people have with respect to giving us that
information, both their search histories as well as other pieces of
information, they get very upset, very, very quickly if we, in their view,
misuse it.

"So, what we typically tell people is we're not going to do the kinds of
things that you could do with this, in particular use it to generate sort of
strange ads against your history and things like that, without your explicit
permission. And we probably, in many cases, won't do it forever."

\--Q3 2010 Earnings Call, October 14, 2010 [http://www.123jump.com/earnings-
calls/Google-Q3-Earnings-Cal...](http://www.123jump.com/earnings-
calls/Google-Q3-Earnings-Call-Transcript/41199/281)

And this was a conversation with investors, not privacy advocates.

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spiffworks
God in heaven, in the history of technology there has never been a more
transparent, honest company that is openly willing to admit its mistakes and
the gravity of the role that it plays. And all we can focus on is a bunch of
sound-bites that a few rags have tactfully culled from the man's message. If
you have ever seen Schmidt speaking, the man has a professorial manner. He
gives full, well-rounded answers to questions. And when rags pick up the
sound-bites, Gruber conveniently jumps in and calls him a creep. Give the man
a break.

~~~
theBobMcCormick
> He gives full, well-rounded answers to questions. And when rags pick up the
> sound-bites, Gruber conveniently jumps in and calls him a creep.

IMHO, that says _much_ more about Gruber, than about Schmidt.

------
Keyframe
_“One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict
the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing
that.”_

I doubt that - maybe they could build a reliable sentiment indicator (paired
with twitter data), but even that would have a lag. How would that be illegal
anyways?

~~~
naner
If it isn't currently illegal it would be quickly made illegal.

I imagine this could be accomplished with similar techniques they use to track
health epidemics[1]?

1: <http://www.google.org/flutrends/about/how.html>

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jasonlotito
Every time he says something "creepy", I always find it's taken out of
context. Or, more appropriately, he's simple stating the truth, and we just
find it uncomfortable. The classic case is: “If you have something that you
don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first
place.”

It's true. It's creepy, but only if you forget that it's reality. People took
this quote to mean so much more than it did.

I'm not saying as CEO he shouldn't be careful of what he says, but at least
he's saying something, rather than just speaking about vertically integrated
forward-thinking active promotions across multiple wide-vector-outreach
systems leveraging past-promised and future-potential market segments.

~~~
apl
It's neither true nor "reality." There is a significant difference between
privacy and secrecy. Let's assume I regularly search for terms x, y, z, but
don't want anyone to know about it.

There are two possible explanations. Maybe the reason why I want to keep these
things private is that they're flat out illegal. Child pornography, for
instance. But maybe the reason is simply that I feel ashamed or uncomfortable
- e.g., herpes medication, unusual fetishes or the Perl documentation.

Are you seriously telling me that I have to be open about everything I do, and
that when I don't want to, then I'm doing something illegal or morally
objectionable?

Wow.

~~~
kgo
Part of the full quote:

"If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -
including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's
important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the
Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made
available to the authorities."

So in context, he's basically saying that of course if you're logged into
google, surfing from your same home IP, well duh, of course Google, or the
government, or your ISP, or some random hacker can figure it out. You can't
guarantee privacy without using something like Tor.

~~~
prodigal_erik
He didn't say "maybe you shouldn't be letting anyone know," he said "maybe you
_shouldn't be doing it_." He seems to think conformity is a better solution
than privacy.

~~~
cryptoz
The implied ending to that sentence is "...on Google."

"Maybe you shouldn't do it [...on Google]. Or, [...on the internet]. Or [...in
a way that people can find out].

The idea is that privacy is difficult on the Internet: your ISP knows what
you're doing, your search engine knows what you're doing, etc.

So doing something online _without telling someone about it_ is really really
hard. So if you don't want someone to know about it, basically your only
choice is to not do it [online].

It's not that creepy and it's not the typical privacy fallacy everyone thinks
it is (the "if you're not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to hide"
bullshit)

------
face
This is just a few quotations taken out of context. It seems that it's been
particularly popular to do this with Schmidt lately; I wonder why that is.

------
nck4222
Even out of context, a couple of those aren't really creepy.

~~~
pmiller2
I agree. Most of these (clearly out of context) quotations I found merely
boneheadedly naive rather than creepy.

