
An open letter to Eric Schmidt - genieyclo
http://vanelsas.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/an-open-letter-to-eric-schmidt/
======
snprbob86
Schmidt's quote is clearly out of context and overblown. Rather than
crucifying the man, we should seek clarification of his position. Personally,
I believe that his actual stance is along the lines of: "Google does
everything it can to protect the privacy of users. Unfortunately, we are
required to retain some data by law and some by practicality. If you are doing
something you don't want known, the only way to be completely safe it to not
put that data in the hands of others. However, if you had to put your private
data in the hands of any major internet service company, I believe that Google
is the safest choice."

~~~
fserb
I cannot thank you enough for this comment. I've been hearing non-sense
comments over this quote for a week now, including the original post on this
thread.

~~~
snprbob86
People forget that CEOs, politicians, celebrities, and everyone else _are
people too_. Everyone knows what it is like to say something, but mean
something else. Everyone knows what it is like to have to clarify what you
just said. People who speak publicly, as part of their job, make far fewer
errors than us "normal" folk, but they still make errors. When they make a
single error, it is perfectly acceptable to raise an eyebrow, but it is almost
never acceptable to sound an alarm. Having seen Schmidt speak, both on video
and in person, I have no doubt that he'd respond much better to a polite
request for clarification than a misguided angry letter.

EDIT: And I don't even think he made that much of an error! The full quote
was:

"I think judgment matters. If you have something that you don't want anyone to
know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. 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."

~~~
vanelsas
It's wrong. I can imagine tons of things that I might want to hide form
others, and none of these things necessarily are evil things. The problem
isn't about hiding. It's about freedom of choice.

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jbrun
Corporations are amoral, they do what is in their interest; the people decide
the morals (or laws) of their society. A lack of privacy is not Google's
fault, they are simply respecting the laws.

Americans let the Patriot Act be passed into law, not Google. Stop blaming
Google and start blaming your democratically elected government. People now
have more privacy and liberty in continental Europe and Canada than they do in
the US.

~~~
9oliYQjP
I'm not disagreeing with you. But I want to point out one thing. Here is an
excerpt of a letter from the founders that is part of their IPO filing to the
SEC. It clearly implies that the Google co-founders envision their company
having morals. They assert that their company will do "good things for the
world" and hope that the company itself "makes the world a better place".

At the time this letter was released, the Wall Street crowd called BS. I
remember the uproar. I was hoping that Google would usher in a different era
of corporate governance; one in which corporate balance sheets don't have
tunnel vision towards "the bottom line" but take into account the bigger
picture. I was wrong. Yesterday I started procuring servers in order to host a
lot of the services that Google provides for me like email. It might not mean
much but it's my own little way of protesting what I believe to be pure
hypocrisy coming from Google.

Taken from: <http://www.secinfo.com/d14D5a.148c8.htm#645a>

_DON’T BE EVIL

Don’t be evil. We believe strongly that in the long term, we will be better
served—as shareholders and in all other ways—by a company that does good
things for the world even if we forgo some short term gains. This is an
important aspect of our culture and is broadly shared within the company.

Google users trust our systems to help them with important decisions: medical,
financial and many others. Our search results are the best we know how to
produce. They are unbiased and objective, and we do not accept payment for
them or for inclusion or more frequent updating. We also display advertising,
which we work hard to make relevant, and we label it clearly. This is similar
to a well-run newspaper, where the advertisements are clear and the articles
are not influenced by the advertisers’ payments. We believe it is important
for everyone to have access to the best information and research, not only to
the information people pay for you to see.

MAKING THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE

We aspire to make Google an institution that makes the world a better place.
In pursuing this goal, we will always be mindful of our responsibilities to
our shareholders, employees, customers and business partners. With our
products, Google connects people and information all around the world for
free. We are adding other powerful services such as Gmail, which provides an
efficient one gigabyte Gmail account for free. We know that some people have
raised privacy concerns, primarily over Gmail’s targeted ads, which could lead
to negative perceptions about Google. However, we believe Gmail protects a
user’s privacy. By releasing services, such as Gmail, for free, we hope to
help bridge the digital divide. AdWords connects users and advertisers
efficiently, helping both. AdSense helps fund a huge variety of online web
sites and enables authors who could not otherwise publish. Last year we
created Google Grants—a growing program in which hundreds of non-profits
addressing issues, including the environment, poverty and human rights,
receive free advertising. And now, we are in the process of establishing the
Google Foundation. We intend to contribute significant resources to the
foundation, including employee time and approximately 1% of Google’s equity
and profits in some form. We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google
itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and
significant resources to the largest of the world’s problems._

~~~
csallen
The amount of data and power that Google has is absurd. Their reach is global,
their influence is unparalleled. On top of that, they are a for-profit
company. They have to worry about shareholders, competition, innovation,
pleasing their customers, and feeding their employees. They have every right
to fight tooth and nail for every penny they're capable of earning...

...and yet they don't. Google is quite Good in many scenarios where they could
easily get away with being Evil. You've implied that they have "tunnel vision
towards the bottom line", but I think you'd be hard-pressed to support that
point.

------
csallen
Okay don't crucify me here... but am I the only one who thinks that this vague
concept of privacy is overrated?

Everyone on the internet is so concerned about their stuff being "out there".
What does that even mean? Tens of thousands of real-life strangers see your
face, your children, your address every year. If I wanted to stalk a random
person all day every day in real life, how much information could I gather?
Who would find out?

For some reason it's scary to use Gmail, but it's fine to walk into your bank
and hand over your entire financial history to a complete stranger. People
fear the internet because they fear the unknown. Call me crazy, why don't we
focus on actual issues instead? While you are wasting time complaining that
Google "has your data", people are dying of heart diseases, hunger, AIDS,
cancer, bad emo music, McDonald's, and car crashes, okay? People got real
problems.

On the more practical side, I would argue that the real problem is not one of
privacy, but one of security and common sense. Would you leave a diary of your
secret thoughts sitting on your coffee table? Would you let a stranger store
it for? Probably not. Then why would you put your private information on
Google Docs or Facebook or your blog?

P.S. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems the author actually argues that
Google _owes_ people something, besides great service. And for no other reason
than to tip the balance of power away from itself, otherwise it's "evil".
What?

~~~
sdh
Look to history for the answer to why privacy is so critical to a functioning,
free society.

If you don't care about freedom, then privacy is indeed overrated.

Basically, every law or power given to the government needs to be evaluated as
if the most evil entity imaginable were using it. If it is bad in that
context, then it is a bad law.

~~~
csallen
Faulty logic in my opinion: In the past, people used X to do bad thing Y.
Therefore, X is bad. Should I not be allowed to have a gun, because someone
else shot someone?

It's not having a gun that's bad: it's murder. You can murder in all sorts a
way without a gun.

It's not collecting data that's bad: it's violating trust. You can violate
trust in all sorts of ways without collecting data.

~~~
pyre
But huge pools of data are a temptation to break trust in the way that leaving
a gun in the middle of the street is an invitation to steal it.

~~~
gnaritas
A better analogy would be that huge pools of data are a temptation to break
trust in the way that leaving a huge pile of money lying in the street is a
temptation to steal it. That's what those people see in that data, huge piles
of money.

The question is should we outlaw things that in and of themselves aren't
wrong, but are so tempting that a large minority of people who wouldn't
otherwise break the law fall for the temptation and decide to. DUI isn't
inherently wrong, but the odds of it resulting in harm are so great that it
makes sense to outlaw it. Most of the time DUI is a victim-less crime, that
doesn't mean it should be legal unless you mess up and kill someone.

------
tptacek
Did anyone actually learn something from this blog post? I'd be interested in
hearing what it was.

~~~
CamperBob
I learned why publishers still employ editors.

------
IgorPartola
At the same time consider an alternative to GMail. Are you going to host the
service on a local machine? Are you going to send the e-mails only using PGP?
All the people who are moving their e-mail services from GMail to joe-shmoe-
shared-hosting.com are just switching the people who could be reading their
e-mail, not eliminating them. If you host your own server in your bedroom,
your ISP still can read all your e-mails unless you encrypt them for when they
are "in flight". So can any server on the way from here to the recipient's or
the sender's inbox.

I guess the only real solution would be for someone (startup idea alert) to
start a company based solely on the principal that e-mail should be private
point-to-point and charge exuberant amounts of money for this. E.g. guarantee
a bulletproof, nukeproof data center with storage and transport encryption
that would keep no logs or backups of any kind.

I'm not saying that what Google is saying, doing or we suspect is doing is
right or wrong. I just think that alternatives to Google are companies that
are much greedier or more desperate.

------
gojomo
In some sense, every email to or from a gmail user is an "open letter" to Eric
Schmidt.

(No, I'm not implying that that he or the typical Googler does or would review
private email... only that some non-null set of employees there, probably
including the CEO if he were really determined to do so, _could_.)

~~~
fserb
What is the point you're trying to make? One could use your argument for any
single entity in the world. "I'm not implying that Coca Cola's CEO does or
would put poison on the beverages, only that some non-null set of employees
there, probably including the CEO if he were really determined to do so,
could." Replace Google/review private email with anything and you'll have a
meaningful sentence: Obama/release nukes, kindergarten teachers/child abuse,
etc, etc, etc...

~~~
DrJokepu
Exactly what I'm thinking. I thought this tinfoil hat mentality has died with
slashdot. Face it: any e-mail provider can read your e-mail, including the
e-mail provider of your recipient. The sysadmin in your office can read your
e-mail. Your ISP can read your e-mail even if you host your e-mail server
(unless you use https). Same goes for the ISP of the recipient. The only way
to be safe was if everyone hosted their own e-mail servers and used PGP/GPG to
encrypt their e-mail.

Maybe it's time to stop being paranoid and start concentrating or real
problems? Like pondering on how to create an e-book reader that doesn't suck
or discovering how to cure AIDS and cancer efficiently?

~~~
vanelsas
Two wrongs do not make a right. Google needs to step up and deal with this.

~~~
DrJokepu
How could they possibly solve it? One of the most important features of Google
Mail is fast searching of e-mails. For them to search e-mails, they need to be
able to index them so they can't just encrypt the emails on their storage.

Frankly, for me the abilty to search my emails quickly outweights the risk of
some nosey Google employee with a shallow private life reading my private
email or bank stuff or whatever.

~~~
vanelsas
Let Google ask you specifically if you are ok with that. You get fast search,
and you give up some privacy in return. A clear and explicit exchange.

------
vanelsas
Privacy isn't about hiding things. Its about freedom, choice and the ability
as a human being to draw a line. In the online world this has become
impossible due to the implicit exchange of data taking place. Google provides
you a relevant service, and in return they will take your data. That exchange
needs to be explicit.

------
known
I think every effort to empower common man will be resisted because
legislative, judiciary, administration & corporations will not allow their
clout to be diluted and they want you to be _subservient_ forever.

------
ruby_roo
You know, this whole episode could turn out to be a positive thing if he keeps
pointing toward the Patriot Act as the real culprit. Which it is.

------
amackera
It's Doctor Schmidt, he's got a PhD in EECS. (this really doesn't contribute
to the discussion, I just thought it was cool)

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tedunangst
"If you have something you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be
doing that in the first place."

maybe != definitely.

