9 ms·

He's not creepy, just honest. He knows in the future what we call "privacy" won't exist anymore. Every new innovation gets regulated by the government so that p

He's not creepy, just honest. He knows in the future what we call "privacy" won't exist anymore. Every new innovation gets regulated by the government so that politicians get their cut. Right now we're seeing them redefine "privacy" to mean privacy from anyone other than this corporate/government partnership knowing everything about you. This is what he's talking about -- and it IS inevitable. Here's the real privacy question: will you be able to keep other PEOPLE from knowing everything about you? I've contributed recently to speakerwiki.org -- they are building a massive database of every public/tech/motivational speaker in the world. Rated and Ranked. So what happens when everyone has a Yelp profile that they don't control? Or do corporate/political interests prevent this from ever happening to control their monopoly on data? To me that's the real privacy question for the next 5-10 years. On second thought, he is pretty creepy.

TotlolRon 16y ago
> He's not creepy, just honest. Maybe he is creepy AND honest? Possible?
- tbrownaw 16y ago
  Possible, but if being honest is considered creepy these days it probably means something very bad about our society.
  - nanairo 16y ago
    I find it a bit creepy, because he (or to be exact Google) is one of the people driving us in that direction. If you were on a ship, and the captain told you: "It's hard, but at these rate we'll probably go straight into the storm", and then he turns and does nothing about it, or keeps going... I'd find it a bit creepy. But that's very much a personal opinion. I agree it's not a fair adjective (as in it's too heavy) to use for what we are talking about.
    - wvenable 16y ago
      I think we'd be heading in that direction with or without Google. The technology exists, it will be used.
  - raganwald 16y ago
    "if being honest is considered creepy" I don't see it that way, he's not creepy because he's honest, he's creepy because of what he's honest about. The fictional Gordon Gecko was greedy and honest, but we wouldn't say that being honest was considered greedy, just that being greedy was considered greedy and Gordon Gecko happened to be honest about his venality. In this case, the CEO is being accused of creepiness for the beliefs he espouses, and he is honest about them. If the CEO of another search engine believes the exact same things but says otherwise, you're right we wouldn't consider him creepy yet because we wouldn't know. But the moment we find out, we'd consider that CEO creepy and dishonest. Mind you, upmodded for forcing me to examine my beliefs carefully. One thing we don't want to do is give people/companies who don't say one way or the other a free pass. In other words, if another CEO says they're in favour of privacy, fine. But it would be unfair to pile on Eric yet say nothing about Ballmer just because Ballmer doesn't say anything. The right thing to do is to ask Steve Ballmer what Microsoft/Bing's stance is on these exact same issues. And ask FB, and Apple, and everyone else collecting data. Saying nothing should not be better than being honest.
- flatulent1 16y ago
  He seems honest, just not as comforting as some would like. The problem is reality has become kinda creepy. Google certainly swallowed a lump of creepiness when they bought doubleclick, that company the state of Texas had sued for stalking. One of the former upper figures there was hired by homeland security. Wonder what skill that was for? It seems we must ask if Google is far less evil than others would be in the same position. I'm kind of liking the Apple iAds thing. If done right, it could basically do away with accessing third-party sites when displaying third-party content. The user demographic could be typed simply by the kind of app the ad is in, and just being an Apple customer probably puts him in a more sought-after group of spenders. Hmmm. I just had an odd thought. For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment...
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    > For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment... The people that score the best on games are the ones not playing them. And plenty of games are games of skill and not a good way to measure anything other than their reaction speed to visual stimuli.
    - flatulent1 16y ago
      Okay, let's try going wayyyy beyond that... think what you could do if you actually designed the game for the purpose of testing the user in ways that didn't affect the score.
      - jacquesm 16y ago
        Creepy.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - sesqu 16y ago
        There are several games with alternate storylines and choices that do not affect the score. Those choices often don't affect the storyline, either, because it's too much work. When playing such games, I used to save, try various alternatives, and go with the one I liked best in retrospect. When I encountered a game that didn't allow for saving, I was quite bothered and worried about the game "calling home". These days, I mostly wouldn't worry. A lot of kids slaughtered cities in fallout 2, or accepted quests from all sides so they could get in everywhere and steal the silverware. Few meaningful inferences could be made. But the meaningless stuff, like red vs. yellow stimpacks? Doing market research with games? That might be worrisome, depending on your feelings about adwords.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
jbooth 16y ago
"I'm not a monster, I'm just ahead of the curve." The tech lobby isn't the strongest lobby in the world, but the consumer rights lobby, ACLU et al are even weaker. Given the state of congress, no way any new legislation passes, it'll be "big government usurping the market" and get filibustered or some such. Democrats won't do anything to make it happen and Republicans will outright oppose it on the off-chance that they do. So we'll see the industry definition of acceptable creep outwards. It's driven by the fundamentals. Nobody puts vague notions of consumer privacy above feeding their kids. EDIT: Does this have to get downmodded? Nothing in the post is controversial, and it's not exactly news that Congress has a hard time passing bills these days.
rbarooah 16y ago
I found "I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.", a lot more creepy than the statements about privacy. I'm not so worried about what they know about me, but I am very concerned that Schmidt thinks Google should try to tell me what to do next.
- tkahnoski 16y ago
  Google Maps already tells me what roads to drive on, Amazon tells me what things I should buy, and Facebook tells me who I should be friends with. I would say I am fine with these things since I understand the nature of these algorithms, but there are some very fuzzy situations that occur. Is there a moral dilemma for a recommendation algorithm to suggest things of political nature during an election year? i.e. recommending "Going Rogue" or "The Audacity of Hope" during in the months leading up to a presidential election?
  - rbarooah 16y ago
    I like your examples. Google Maps tells me the whole route, not just 'what to do next'. I can understand how the route was produced, and because it's shown on a map, I can see whether it matches my intentions before I follow it. Amazon is less transparent, but they usually do show things like 'we recommended this because you bought that, and 40% of people who bought that liked this" I'd hardly say that Facebook tells me who to I should be friends with - they mostly suggest people I might already be friends with to make it easier to connect with them. I don't know what algorithm they use, but I guess it's based on mutual friends and their scrape of my email box from ages ago. I wish they would tell me more. Google on the other hand is completely secretive about how they generate their recommendations (i.e. the search results). How do I know the results I see are aligned with my interests? Since Google's customers are advertisers, it wouldn't be unreasonable to guess that the search results are at least to some extent tuned to maximize advertising revenue for Google, as opposed to my needs for quality, breadth of coverage, historically significant results etc. The algorithm may not be tuned to favor specific interests, but it clearly has a structural bias that favors certain kinds of information over other kinds. I think that having so much of the web's information flow governed by secret algorithms is very much a cause for concern.
ccc3 16y ago
He's not creepy, just honest There's a certain branch of honesty that's intensely creepy. It happens when someone is oblivious to the emotions of the people around them, and it's generally characterized by consistently being far too blunt, or dismissively laughing at something that frightens everybody else. Communication is as much about the emotion conveyed as the actual words. If Schmidt thinks it's just a matter of time before it will be the norm to ditch your identity for fear of embarrassment, he's creepy. He's especially creepy because he's dedicated himself to creating the technology that will force temporary identities. The following scene was described in the fortune magazine article: “All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?” A room full of tech journalists cheering and applauding a tech CEO for saying that he's the best person to know everything about everyone is about as creepy as it gets. It sounds like a work of fiction deliberately crafted to be creepy. But Schmidt is insensitive to how most people feel about privacy. He just thinks he escaped a tough question with a clever one-liner.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  He's especially creepy because he's dedicated himself to creating the technology that will force temporary identities. That's it, all right. It is one thing to recognize that, say, the extinction of the passenger pigeon is inevitable. It is quite another thing to deliberately manufacture a net and then use that net to catch the last known passenger pigeon, and then publicly cook it and eat it, all the while knowing exactly what you are doing. That would be... creepy. The other obvious point -- or you'd think it would be obvious -- is that the fact that (e.g.) our websurfing behavior is continuously monitored, collated, and sold to the highest bidder without our specific knowledge is "inevitable" only because Google and similar businesses work to keep it that way. Google's business model is not some law of nature. Perhaps the company will discover this when some less-creepy startup company steals a significant share of their market. It could happen.
- duck 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
GrandMasterBirt 16y ago
Heres the kicker... When google/yelp/etc. control information about people which becomes public, who holds google accountable? What if that information is modified for the gains of the company (or paid off for the gains of the person). He who has money now becomes literally he who controls information, which is just as bad as fascist and communist governments. Hell its scarier even. I think he is not creepy, hes honest. What he stands for is horribly creepy.
fauigerzigerk 16y ago
Nonsense. That's not something anyone can "know". It's something we decide. It's puzzling that anyone would take it seriously when people like Google or Facebook claim to simply adapt to inevitable societal changes when they have very clear vested interests in a particular outcome. These changes are going to lead to huge disasters and Messrs. Schmidt and Zuckerberg will look like the bosses of Lehman and the Fed claiming that markets always price risk correctly. The privacy thing will crash badly. As a shareholder of Google I will work towards getting Mr. Schmidt fired.

TotlolRon 16y ago

> He's not creepy, just honest. Maybe he is creepy AND honest? Possible?

tbrownaw 16y ago
Possible, but if being honest is considered creepy these days it probably means something very bad about our society.
- nanairo 16y ago
  I find it a bit creepy, because he (or to be exact Google) is one of the people driving us in that direction. If you were on a ship, and the captain told you: "It's hard, but at these rate we'll probably go straight into the storm", and then he turns and does nothing about it, or keeps going... I'd find it a bit creepy. But that's very much a personal opinion. I agree it's not a fair adjective (as in it's too heavy) to use for what we are talking about.
  - wvenable 16y ago
    I think we'd be heading in that direction with or without Google. The technology exists, it will be used.
- raganwald 16y ago
  "if being honest is considered creepy" I don't see it that way, he's not creepy because he's honest, he's creepy because of what he's honest about. The fictional Gordon Gecko was greedy and honest, but we wouldn't say that being honest was considered greedy, just that being greedy was considered greedy and Gordon Gecko happened to be honest about his venality. In this case, the CEO is being accused of creepiness for the beliefs he espouses, and he is honest about them. If the CEO of another search engine believes the exact same things but says otherwise, you're right we wouldn't consider him creepy yet because we wouldn't know. But the moment we find out, we'd consider that CEO creepy and dishonest. Mind you, upmodded for forcing me to examine my beliefs carefully. One thing we don't want to do is give people/companies who don't say one way or the other a free pass. In other words, if another CEO says they're in favour of privacy, fine. But it would be unfair to pile on Eric yet say nothing about Ballmer just because Ballmer doesn't say anything. The right thing to do is to ask Steve Ballmer what Microsoft/Bing's stance is on these exact same issues. And ask FB, and Apple, and everyone else collecting data. Saying nothing should not be better than being honest.
flatulent1 16y ago
He seems honest, just not as comforting as some would like. The problem is reality has become kinda creepy. Google certainly swallowed a lump of creepiness when they bought doubleclick, that company the state of Texas had sued for stalking. One of the former upper figures there was hired by homeland security. Wonder what skill that was for? It seems we must ask if Google is far less evil than others would be in the same position. I'm kind of liking the Apple iAds thing. If done right, it could basically do away with accessing third-party sites when displaying third-party content. The user demographic could be typed simply by the kind of app the ad is in, and just being an Apple customer probably puts him in a more sought-after group of spenders. Hmmm. I just had an odd thought. For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment...
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > For games with ads, dumb down the ads for people with low scores. Mental bandwidth adjustment... The people that score the best on games are the ones not playing them. And plenty of games are games of skill and not a good way to measure anything other than their reaction speed to visual stimuli.
  - flatulent1 16y ago
    Okay, let's try going wayyyy beyond that... think what you could do if you actually designed the game for the purpose of testing the user in ways that didn't affect the score.
    - jacquesm 16y ago
      Creepy.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - sesqu 16y ago
      There are several games with alternate storylines and choices that do not affect the score. Those choices often don't affect the storyline, either, because it's too much work. When playing such games, I used to save, try various alternatives, and go with the one I liked best in retrospect. When I encountered a game that didn't allow for saving, I was quite bothered and worried about the game "calling home". These days, I mostly wouldn't worry. A lot of kids slaughtered cities in fallout 2, or accepted quests from all sides so they could get in everywhere and steal the silverware. Few meaningful inferences could be made. But the meaningless stuff, like red vs. yellow stimpacks? Doing market research with games? That might be worrisome, depending on your feelings about adwords.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

jbooth 16y ago

"I'm not a monster, I'm just ahead of the curve." The tech lobby isn't the strongest lobby in the world, but the consumer rights lobby, ACLU et al are even weaker. Given the state of congress, no way any new legislation passes, it'll be "big government usurping the market" and get filibustered or some such. Democrats won't do anything to make it happen and Republicans will outright oppose it on the off-chance that they do. So we'll see the industry definition of acceptable creep outwards. It's driven by the fundamentals. Nobody puts vague notions of consumer privacy above feeding their kids. EDIT: Does this have to get downmodded? Nothing in the post is controversial, and it's not exactly news that Congress has a hard time passing bills these days.

rbarooah 16y ago

I found "I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.", a lot more creepy than the statements about privacy. I'm not so worried about what they know about me, but I am very concerned that Schmidt thinks Google should try to tell me what to do next.

tkahnoski 16y ago
Google Maps already tells me what roads to drive on, Amazon tells me what things I should buy, and Facebook tells me who I should be friends with. I would say I am fine with these things since I understand the nature of these algorithms, but there are some very fuzzy situations that occur. Is there a moral dilemma for a recommendation algorithm to suggest things of political nature during an election year? i.e. recommending "Going Rogue" or "The Audacity of Hope" during in the months leading up to a presidential election?
- rbarooah 16y ago
  I like your examples. Google Maps tells me the whole route, not just 'what to do next'. I can understand how the route was produced, and because it's shown on a map, I can see whether it matches my intentions before I follow it. Amazon is less transparent, but they usually do show things like 'we recommended this because you bought that, and 40% of people who bought that liked this" I'd hardly say that Facebook tells me who to I should be friends with - they mostly suggest people I might already be friends with to make it easier to connect with them. I don't know what algorithm they use, but I guess it's based on mutual friends and their scrape of my email box from ages ago. I wish they would tell me more. Google on the other hand is completely secretive about how they generate their recommendations (i.e. the search results). How do I know the results I see are aligned with my interests? Since Google's customers are advertisers, it wouldn't be unreasonable to guess that the search results are at least to some extent tuned to maximize advertising revenue for Google, as opposed to my needs for quality, breadth of coverage, historically significant results etc. The algorithm may not be tuned to favor specific interests, but it clearly has a structural bias that favors certain kinds of information over other kinds. I think that having so much of the web's information flow governed by secret algorithms is very much a cause for concern.

ccc3 16y ago

He's not creepy, just honest There's a certain branch of honesty that's intensely creepy. It happens when someone is oblivious to the emotions of the people around them, and it's generally characterized by consistently being far too blunt, or dismissively laughing at something that frightens everybody else. Communication is as much about the emotion conveyed as the actual words. If Schmidt thinks it's just a matter of time before it will be the norm to ditch your identity for fear of embarrassment, he's creepy. He's especially creepy because he's dedicated himself to creating the technology that will force temporary identities. The following scene was described in the fortune magazine article: “All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?” A room full of tech journalists cheering and applauding a tech CEO for saying that he's the best person to know everything about everyone is about as creepy as it gets. It sounds like a work of fiction deliberately crafted to be creepy. But Schmidt is insensitive to how most people feel about privacy. He just thinks he escaped a tough question with a clever one-liner.

mechanical_fish 16y ago
He's especially creepy because he's dedicated himself to creating the technology that will force temporary identities. That's it, all right. It is one thing to recognize that, say, the extinction of the passenger pigeon is inevitable. It is quite another thing to deliberately manufacture a net and then use that net to catch the last known passenger pigeon, and then publicly cook it and eat it, all the while knowing exactly what you are doing. That would be... creepy. The other obvious point -- or you'd think it would be obvious -- is that the fact that (e.g.) our websurfing behavior is continuously monitored, collated, and sold to the highest bidder without our specific knowledge is "inevitable" only because Google and similar businesses work to keep it that way. Google's business model is not some law of nature. Perhaps the company will discover this when some less-creepy startup company steals a significant share of their market. It could happen.
duck 16y ago

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

GrandMasterBirt 16y ago

Heres the kicker... When google/yelp/etc. control information about people which becomes public, who holds google accountable? What if that information is modified for the gains of the company (or paid off for the gains of the person). He who has money now becomes literally he who controls information, which is just as bad as fascist and communist governments. Hell its scarier even. I think he is not creepy, hes honest. What he stands for is horribly creepy.

fauigerzigerk 16y ago

Nonsense. That's not something anyone can "know". It's something we decide. It's puzzling that anyone would take it seriously when people like Google or Facebook claim to simply adapt to inevitable societal changes when they have very clear vested interests in a particular outcome. These changes are going to lead to huge disasters and Messrs. Schmidt and Zuckerberg will look like the bosses of Lehman and the Fed claiming that markets always price risk correctly. The privacy thing will crash badly. As a shareholder of Google I will work towards getting Mr. Schmidt fired.