5 ms·

He's also very supportive of government surveillance and has spent a substantial amount of his career cultivating relationships with officials. All this is tha

He's also very supportive of government surveillance and has spent a substantial amount of his career cultivating relationships with officials. All this is thanks to the Microsoft anti-trust lawsuit which led Google to choose someone like Schmidt to ingratiate the company with lawmakers to prevent a similar lawsuit.

benevol 11y ago
Mass surveillance is in Google's/Schmidt's DNA. It's their business model: More surveillance => most precise profiles on Internet users => most precise ad targeting => higher margin => more $$$
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- api 11y ago
  If anything private sector driven surveillance can be creepier-- it's a total "wild west" without even the pretense of public oversight and virtually no regulation. Only the most insanely creepy things like capturing video from your house and using it for analytics might run afoul of the law, and even there you'd have to prove it and prove harm and it would likely be civil not criminal. The NSA and CIA at least technically answer to the public and are subject to regulations about what they can do with the data. To quote Steve Rambam from HOPE: "If you're angry about what the NSA is doing, you should be furious about what Google and Facebook are doing." IMHO the Amazon Echo and similar beyond-Orwellian devices will someday be looked back upon with the same amount of "what were they thinking?!!?!" as stuff like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core To continue with the nuclear analogy: I've been predicting a privacy/security "Chernobyl" event related to mobile and/or IoT for many years now. It'll be something like a corporate whistleblower revealing that a company has been running all ambient sound from all customers' houses through speech to text for over a year, then putting it all in a database and selling access more or less indiscriminately. Customers, it will come out, will include organized crime, foreign governments, etc., and some of the data will turn out to be from the homes of US Government Secret and Top Secret clearance employees, CXO level corporate personnel, police, etc. Only a matter of time. I'm counting the days.
  - eru 11y ago
    If you give me a deadline and a list of companies, I am willing to bet money against this.
    - niels_olson 11y ago
      Before 1 January 2020. Company will be a recent entrant into the fortune 1000. By recent, I mean not in the Fortune 1000 as of 1 January 2010. $1 says it happens. If 100 people bet against me, I pay out 1 cent to each. If more than 100 bet against me and win, I pay a cent to first 100. I'm not sure how other lines of betting work, but interested in proposals.
      - progressive_dad 11y ago
        You already won. Based on their current valuation if Uber went public today they would be in the top 25% of fortune 500 companies. http://time.com/3847596/politicians-uber/ http://time.com/3847596/politicians-uber/
      - eru 11y ago
        Thanks. That's too general for me. I would bet if you gave me a smaller list of companies (eg Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), and a more specific list of incidents. And, of course, we would have to agree on odds. Eg, if you are really sure you could offer to pay me 5 USD if your prediction comes true, but I'd only have to pay 1 USD otherwise. (Or if I feel more sure, I could offer eg to pay 7 USD for every 4 USD you wager.)
    - api 11y ago
      A list would be tough. I'd personally bet on a Chinese vendor or a perhaps yet to be born startup with explosive growth on a trendy home automation product. I'd say by 2020 or so there will be a major well publicized leak or scandal from such a vendor. It'd be hard to place a bet though, since it'd be hard to decide if/when a bet were actually won.
eevilspock 11y ago
So now Google is part of the military-industrial complex in more ways than one.
- grandalf 11y ago
  Indeed. This was the big lesson from the MS Antitrust lawsuit. In comparison to the kind of entrenched, wasteful lobbying going on today, Microsoft in its heyday was naively pursuing market dominance and utterly overlooked the need to cozy up to officials.
hendler 11y ago
While corruption won't be good, the rational might be Schmidt is a "lesser evil". Is corruption preferable to ignorance? In other words, are decisions made to serve a few, or with ignorance, serve chaos. More than corruption, my concerns would be respect and understanding of privacy, checks and balances through neutrality, transparency, and decentralization, and creation of open standards and protocols, etc.
- grandalf 11y ago
  Schmidt is a technocrat-for-hire. He is able to effectively lead and represent an organization's views. However his worldview is out of the industrial age. He was largely responsible for building Alphabet, a modern IT conglomerate built on the same principles as any conglomerate. We need to demand more from our government than competent technocrats. I would not say Schmidt is corrupt, he is acting fully in the interest of his firm or organization. Like a defense attorney helping a murderer avoid jail his actions are broadly ethical, but if you consider in aggregate all of the betrayals of "don't be evil" that Google suffered under his command, it's clear that he is not in any sense a leader in any area where values or principles are important. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of an issue where Google has a big stake in a particular outcome, and there is nothing idealistic or principled about its advocacy of one side. This is fine as an aspect of the incentives of capitalism, but the scary part is that so many people bought into the propaganda and did not see Google's true motivation.

benevol 11y ago

Mass surveillance is in Google's/Schmidt's DNA. It's their business model: More surveillance => most precise profiles on Internet users => most precise ad targeting => higher margin => more $$$

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
api 11y ago
If anything private sector driven surveillance can be creepier-- it's a total "wild west" without even the pretense of public oversight and virtually no regulation. Only the most insanely creepy things like capturing video from your house and using it for analytics might run afoul of the law, and even there you'd have to prove it and prove harm and it would likely be civil not criminal. The NSA and CIA at least technically answer to the public and are subject to regulations about what they can do with the data. To quote Steve Rambam from HOPE: "If you're angry about what the NSA is doing, you should be furious about what Google and Facebook are doing." IMHO the Amazon Echo and similar beyond-Orwellian devices will someday be looked back upon with the same amount of "what were they thinking?!!?!" as stuff like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core To continue with the nuclear analogy: I've been predicting a privacy/security "Chernobyl" event related to mobile and/or IoT for many years now. It'll be something like a corporate whistleblower revealing that a company has been running all ambient sound from all customers' houses through speech to text for over a year, then putting it all in a database and selling access more or less indiscriminately. Customers, it will come out, will include organized crime, foreign governments, etc., and some of the data will turn out to be from the homes of US Government Secret and Top Secret clearance employees, CXO level corporate personnel, police, etc. Only a matter of time. I'm counting the days.
- eru 11y ago
  If you give me a deadline and a list of companies, I am willing to bet money against this.
  - niels_olson 11y ago
    Before 1 January 2020. Company will be a recent entrant into the fortune 1000. By recent, I mean not in the Fortune 1000 as of 1 January 2010. $1 says it happens. If 100 people bet against me, I pay out 1 cent to each. If more than 100 bet against me and win, I pay a cent to first 100. I'm not sure how other lines of betting work, but interested in proposals.
    - progressive_dad 11y ago
      You already won. Based on their current valuation if Uber went public today they would be in the top 25% of fortune 500 companies. http://time.com/3847596/politicians-uber/ http://time.com/3847596/politicians-uber/
    - eru 11y ago
      Thanks. That's too general for me. I would bet if you gave me a smaller list of companies (eg Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft), and a more specific list of incidents. And, of course, we would have to agree on odds. Eg, if you are really sure you could offer to pay me 5 USD if your prediction comes true, but I'd only have to pay 1 USD otherwise. (Or if I feel more sure, I could offer eg to pay 7 USD for every 4 USD you wager.)
  - api 11y ago
    A list would be tough. I'd personally bet on a Chinese vendor or a perhaps yet to be born startup with explosive growth on a trendy home automation product. I'd say by 2020 or so there will be a major well publicized leak or scandal from such a vendor. It'd be hard to place a bet though, since it'd be hard to decide if/when a bet were actually won.

eevilspock 11y ago

So now Google is part of the military-industrial complex in more ways than one.

grandalf 11y ago
Indeed. This was the big lesson from the MS Antitrust lawsuit. In comparison to the kind of entrenched, wasteful lobbying going on today, Microsoft in its heyday was naively pursuing market dominance and utterly overlooked the need to cozy up to officials.

hendler 11y ago

While corruption won't be good, the rational might be Schmidt is a "lesser evil". Is corruption preferable to ignorance? In other words, are decisions made to serve a few, or with ignorance, serve chaos. More than corruption, my concerns would be respect and understanding of privacy, checks and balances through neutrality, transparency, and decentralization, and creation of open standards and protocols, etc.

grandalf 11y ago
Schmidt is a technocrat-for-hire. He is able to effectively lead and represent an organization's views. However his worldview is out of the industrial age. He was largely responsible for building Alphabet, a modern IT conglomerate built on the same principles as any conglomerate. We need to demand more from our government than competent technocrats. I would not say Schmidt is corrupt, he is acting fully in the interest of his firm or organization. Like a defense attorney helping a murderer avoid jail his actions are broadly ethical, but if you consider in aggregate all of the betrayals of "don't be evil" that Google suffered under his command, it's clear that he is not in any sense a leader in any area where values or principles are important. Net Neutrality is a perfect example of an issue where Google has a big stake in a particular outcome, and there is nothing idealistic or principled about its advocacy of one side. This is fine as an aspect of the incentives of capitalism, but the scary part is that so many people bought into the propaganda and did not see Google's true motivation.