30 ms·

William Gibson: "Google's Earth"

RBr 16y ago
"Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth" After a preamble that compares Google to the artificial intelligence described in science fiction books, this was what I will take away from that article. Kids are growing up with public persona's and as anyone 30 or over will tell you, those persona's change drastically over the course of our lives. Building on this, I want to be known as a different person to different people. In the current Facebook and Google Indexing style of amassing information, there is no way for me to do this. I want to be known as a trustworthy, reliable father; a fun-loving, somewhat reckless friend; and a knowledgeable leader to my colleagues. However, I have no way to separate my past, present and future or the different people that I want to be known as right now.
- lsc 16y ago
  "Kids are growing up with public persona's and as anyone 30 or over will tell you, those persona's change drastically over the course of our lives." This is the ray of hope, I think. As more and more people grow up with the embarrassing details of our adolescence online and public forever, having those embarrassing details public will be less of a big deal than it was in the past.
  - pyre 16y ago
    Or those that didn't participate in placing their lives online will hold the pasts of others against them (i.e. the new 'power elite').
    - lsc 16y ago
      yeah, that would be the worry. Of course, if social networks produce real value, then those who choose to opt-out would be at a disadvantage.
      - pyre 16y ago
        Who's to say that people won't opt-in but be very selective of what they inject into the system?
        lsc 16y ago
        I find it... unlikely that the average teen will be selective about what they inject into the system. The average teen goes out of his way, sometimes way out of his way to shock parents and society. Sure, there are a few teens who will try to appear normal and responsible, but I don't think that will matter. the average decides what is acceptable.
  - CWuestefeld 16y ago
    I don't know the psychology behind this, but it seems to me... I've certainly changed over my 43 years. But I think that's only to a certain depth. I think that through my life (since I was a teen, at least) I've had a pretty consist underlying philosophy. What has changed is through a process of learning better ways to implement that philosophy. So to the degree that the outward projection reveals that core philosophy, I think that an ongoing record is fair. That said, I share the same dismay that I have to entirely avoid some behaviors for fear of "leakage". And I'm not necessarily talking about drunken Mario playing, but even simple conversations. There are certain topics that I feel I need to avoid publicly because my opinions might either disappoint or somehow bother others.
    - lsc 16y ago
      huh. since my teens my very basic philosophy has changed quite a lot. especially if you were raised with a philosophy that was unsuitable for who you are and what you want to do, I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect you to have something as complex as your personal philosophy and values figured out before the age of 20. In my early and mid teens I was reading (and mostly agreeing with) skinner and marx. I actually felt considerable angst as it became clear I was going to spend my life building and/or maintaining computer systems- systems that automate away human jobs. I spent my late teens and early 20s on Rand and the like. Picking up (and even partially living by) some radical ideology is pretty common for teens, I think, and most of us grow out of it. Personally, I can't imagine holding some ridiculous rant one posted as a teenager against an adult; Me, I'd even tend to forgive (some) actual hurtful actions undertaken by those same teens, assuming that it appears that they grew out of it. I mean, testing your own limits and figuring out what sort of person you want to be is what being a teenager is all about.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  I have a couple of very long running web sites and the #1 request I get is from people to pretty please remove any and all traces of what they were up to a decade ago.
  - jgrahamc 16y ago
    There's probably money in that. Imagine a service that would allow me to eradicate bits of my past. Could be handy.
    - dood 16y ago
      There are services that purport to do that, at least on the web. I think the term is 'reputation management'.
      - deleted 16y ago
        [deleted]
      - gvb 16y ago
        The extreme version is known as digital suicide: http://www.google.com/search?q=digital+suicide http://www.google.com/search?q=digital+suicide
        mkramlich 16y ago
        Any service that offered to carry out 'digital suicide' would have to be damn sure they had authorization from the person in question. Otherwise it would become digital homocide.
    - crs 16y ago
      What scares me is sites looking at this as easy money. By that I mean they purposely go out and collect as much info as possible so that you will want to pay to "remove it". Even worse multiple sites doing it so that there is a never ending trail of sites to remove your information. It only takes one to get your info indexed on the major search engines.
  - 16y ago
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  I want to be known as a trustworthy, reliable father; a fun-loving, somewhat reckless friend, and a knowledgeable leader to my colleagues. However, I have no way to separate not only my past, present and future as Gibson suggests but also the different people that I want to be known as right now. Guess what: there never was such a way, in real life, either. Your friends may hang out at the same bar as your colleagues. Your colleagues' children may be in the same school class as your kids. Your "reckless friend" may start telling stories about you. Controlling your reputation is hard. Keeping different segments of your life from coming into contact with each other is hard. Keeping secrets is hard. Google and Facebook change the medium, but they don't fundamentally change the rules.
  - pavs 16y ago
    > Your friends may hang out at the same bar as your colleagues. Your colleagues' children may be in the same school class as your kids. Your "reckless friend" may start telling stories about you. There is a difference between what your reckless friend might spill out when he is drunk and having a permanent record which anyone can have access to at will (with little effort).
  - fbnt 16y ago
    There is a big difference between acting accordingly to the social group you're into and eventually see the different segments collide, and exposing a publicly available book of all your diverse personalities in the various stages of your life. What I foresee isn't a clamp down on privacy policies, rather a general people's flattening of behavioral characteristics, in order to keep the acceptable boundaries between all the different, inevitably public, social situations.
  - Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
    What should (hopefully) happen is that after a period of adjustment, people will respect your right to be different in different walks of life. They'll understand that it's possible, and indeed desirable, to be reliable and professional at work while still being immature with your kids and occasionally irresponsible with your friends. What really needs to change is the need to maintain the appearance of being different people (because you're always you, unless you have severe psychological issues you aren't really different people). People need to understand that what I do at home and what I do at work needn't overlap. It's just an extension of the adjustment that started with dress down - an understanding that wearing jeans didn't make me any less smart than wearing a suit. People will understand that playing Mario Kart while drunk with my friends doesn't make me less able than if I spent that time reading Dickens.
- Tuna-Fish 16y ago
  The problem is, there are people who especially want to connect the different fronts you have right now, and are potentially willing to pay a large amount for it (for example, employers and possible mates), while your teenage exploits are not really interesting.
- Qz 16y ago
  * In the current Facebook and Google Indexing style of amassing information, there is no way for me to do this.* This isn't really true. If you want to be known as a different person, be that different person. Whether your online 'persona' catches up is not the same thing. Your online persona is not you. People who mistake one for the other were probably not worth knowing to begin with.
  - Qz 16y ago
    Okay, maybe the last sentence was a little melodramatic, but the point stands.
- sdrinf 16y ago
  > However, I have no way to separate my past, present and future or the different people that I want to be known as right now. Yes there is. I wrote about it a year ago -finally demand is catching up with that :) http://superuser.com/questions/29177/best-practices-for-managing-virtual-personae/29193#29193 http://superuser.com/questions/29177/best-practices-for-mana...
- theBobMcCormick 16y ago
  People in small towns never had this luxury. Everyone knows everything about you. It sounds like in the future, the whole world will be a small town.
- itgoon 16y ago
  Shameless blog plug. http://itgoon.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-want-online-persona-manager.html http://itgoon.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-want-online-persona-man...
mmaunder 16y ago
Spectacular! Love the subtle reference to The Second Coming in the last graph. Mr Gibson you continue to capture, distill and serve up the essence of cyberspace.
- sabat 16y ago
  I cannot imagine why this legitimate comment would be voted down.
  - three14 16y ago
    Without this comment, I wouldn't have given the parent a second glance. And without that, I wouldn't have realized that "slouching towards" is a phrase I easily recognized without being able to recognize the source. So some googling (hah!) later, I found the text of The Second Coming by Yeats here: http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html And it turns out, as the GP says, that Gibson is making a wonderful and highly relevant reference to the poem.
    - sabat 16y ago
      It's not obvious now, but when I came across the parent comment, it was at -2. Don't understand the hate.
fwdbureau 16y ago
The funny thing about all this is that since the beginning of the internet, no data privacy issues were ever raised, and that at some point (i may be wrong, but symbolically i would say it started when facebook became really huge) it became a real topic. Coincidentally, facebook becoming huge marked the moment when everybody started to use their real names instead of nicknames. Maybe it's time to do the math, and start wondering if using your real name for every post, every comment, every little lolcat action you take online is really worth signing it with your real name. Returning to nicknames for most of your online appearances would probably render Mr Schmidt's point moot
- powrtoch 16y ago
  Not really. Most people use the same username or a slight variation thereof for everything they do online. If I read a LiveJournal post you write, I can probably Google your username and discover 90% of your contributions to the web instantly. From all that data I can probably learn enough about you to be scary (where you live, who you hang out with, hobbies, past relationships...), and Google itself could learn basically anything. Of course all of this varies person to person, but it's already known to be an effective heuristic by the password-stealing community. Point being: we live in a time of powerful data mining algorithms, and they're only going to get better. Anonymity does not come easy.
  - fwdbureau 16y ago
    Sure (i just googled my favourite username, and found indeed some pretty old stuff that i'd rather keep forgotten). But listing all the appearances of your online persona is one thing, being able to search for your real-life name and retrieve all the embarrassing info attached to it is another. I'm not saying privacy-conscious persons should obfuscate absolutely everything they publish, but considering how things work, the least anyone should do is to make the retrieval of such information a bit more difficult.
- locopati 16y ago
  I would mark your 'at some point' as pretty early on in the life of the WWW. When web bugs were first introduced (1995? 1997?), there was a huge hew & cry, much along the lines of what we see on HN every time Facebook does something stupid with their privacy settings. The difference is that web bugs was one of the first times some of the implications of the connectedness of the web started to break through the initial excitement/confusion about this (then) brand new thing. Now nobody blinks about web bugs (excepting that big report a while back - Wash Post? - about just how many of the things many sites use - but I don't think that report was new info to anyone involved in the tech side of the web).
kingkawn 16y ago
In case you didn't get it, he really wants a genie.
doron 16y ago
The Top down transparency imposed by Google, facebook etc (as well as the increased surveillance by other entities) seems to be tempered by a bottom up demand for State and corporate secrets being leaked in increased frequency (WikiLeaks etc..) It will be interesting to see how transparency (by design or not) will effect corporate governance and state behavior.
- code_duck 16y ago
  Yeah, nice how there's a double standard at work. The government wants to have free access to all of our phone calls, emails, stored digital files and heck, even houses, as well as store images, fingerprints and even DNA of each citizen, but on the other hand, they insist that their own privacy is paramount and even filming a police officer can be a crime.
code_duck 16y ago
Is the first quote totally out of context, or does Eric Schmidt seem more stupid, creepy and horrible every day? I've always liked Google a good bit, but I'd be prepared to put them in the 'as bad as microsoft or worse' category, based on their CEO, if he doesn't go away or stop talking soon.

RBr 16y ago

"Nor do I take much comfort in the thought that Google itself would have to be trusted never to link one’s sober adulthood to one’s wild youth" After a preamble that compares Google to the artificial intelligence described in science fiction books, this was what I will take away from that article. Kids are growing up with public persona's and as anyone 30 or over will tell you, those persona's change drastically over the course of our lives. Building on this, I want to be known as a different person to different people. In the current Facebook and Google Indexing style of amassing information, there is no way for me to do this. I want to be known as a trustworthy, reliable father; a fun-loving, somewhat reckless friend; and a knowledgeable leader to my colleagues. However, I have no way to separate my past, present and future or the different people that I want to be known as right now.

lsc 16y ago
"Kids are growing up with public persona's and as anyone 30 or over will tell you, those persona's change drastically over the course of our lives." This is the ray of hope, I think. As more and more people grow up with the embarrassing details of our adolescence online and public forever, having those embarrassing details public will be less of a big deal than it was in the past.
- pyre 16y ago
  Or those that didn't participate in placing their lives online will hold the pasts of others against them (i.e. the new 'power elite').
  - lsc 16y ago
    yeah, that would be the worry. Of course, if social networks produce real value, then those who choose to opt-out would be at a disadvantage.
    - pyre 16y ago
      Who's to say that people won't opt-in but be very selective of what they inject into the system?
      - lsc 16y ago
        I find it... unlikely that the average teen will be selective about what they inject into the system. The average teen goes out of his way, sometimes way out of his way to shock parents and society. Sure, there are a few teens who will try to appear normal and responsible, but I don't think that will matter. the average decides what is acceptable.
- CWuestefeld 16y ago
  I don't know the psychology behind this, but it seems to me... I've certainly changed over my 43 years. But I think that's only to a certain depth. I think that through my life (since I was a teen, at least) I've had a pretty consist underlying philosophy. What has changed is through a process of learning better ways to implement that philosophy. So to the degree that the outward projection reveals that core philosophy, I think that an ongoing record is fair. That said, I share the same dismay that I have to entirely avoid some behaviors for fear of "leakage". And I'm not necessarily talking about drunken Mario playing, but even simple conversations. There are certain topics that I feel I need to avoid publicly because my opinions might either disappoint or somehow bother others.
  - lsc 16y ago
    huh. since my teens my very basic philosophy has changed quite a lot. especially if you were raised with a philosophy that was unsuitable for who you are and what you want to do, I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect you to have something as complex as your personal philosophy and values figured out before the age of 20. In my early and mid teens I was reading (and mostly agreeing with) skinner and marx. I actually felt considerable angst as it became clear I was going to spend my life building and/or maintaining computer systems- systems that automate away human jobs. I spent my late teens and early 20s on Rand and the like. Picking up (and even partially living by) some radical ideology is pretty common for teens, I think, and most of us grow out of it. Personally, I can't imagine holding some ridiculous rant one posted as a teenager against an adult; Me, I'd even tend to forgive (some) actual hurtful actions undertaken by those same teens, assuming that it appears that they grew out of it. I mean, testing your own limits and figuring out what sort of person you want to be is what being a teenager is all about.
jacquesm 16y ago
I have a couple of very long running web sites and the #1 request I get is from people to pretty please remove any and all traces of what they were up to a decade ago.
- jgrahamc 16y ago
  There's probably money in that. Imagine a service that would allow me to eradicate bits of my past. Could be handy.
  - dood 16y ago
    There are services that purport to do that, at least on the web. I think the term is 'reputation management'.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
    - gvb 16y ago
      The extreme version is known as digital suicide: http://www.google.com/search?q=digital+suicide http://www.google.com/search?q=digital+suicide
      - mkramlich 16y ago
        Any service that offered to carry out 'digital suicide' would have to be damn sure they had authorization from the person in question. Otherwise it would become digital homocide.
  - crs 16y ago
    What scares me is sites looking at this as easy money. By that I mean they purposely go out and collect as much info as possible so that you will want to pay to "remove it". Even worse multiple sites doing it so that there is a never ending trail of sites to remove your information. It only takes one to get your info indexed on the major search engines.
- 16y ago
michael_dorfman 16y ago
I want to be known as a trustworthy, reliable father; a fun-loving, somewhat reckless friend, and a knowledgeable leader to my colleagues. However, I have no way to separate not only my past, present and future as Gibson suggests but also the different people that I want to be known as right now. Guess what: there never was such a way, in real life, either. Your friends may hang out at the same bar as your colleagues. Your colleagues' children may be in the same school class as your kids. Your "reckless friend" may start telling stories about you. Controlling your reputation is hard. Keeping different segments of your life from coming into contact with each other is hard. Keeping secrets is hard. Google and Facebook change the medium, but they don't fundamentally change the rules.
- pavs 16y ago
  > Your friends may hang out at the same bar as your colleagues. Your colleagues' children may be in the same school class as your kids. Your "reckless friend" may start telling stories about you. There is a difference between what your reckless friend might spill out when he is drunk and having a permanent record which anyone can have access to at will (with little effort).
- fbnt 16y ago
  There is a big difference between acting accordingly to the social group you're into and eventually see the different segments collide, and exposing a publicly available book of all your diverse personalities in the various stages of your life. What I foresee isn't a clamp down on privacy policies, rather a general people's flattening of behavioral characteristics, in order to keep the acceptable boundaries between all the different, inevitably public, social situations.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y ago
  What should (hopefully) happen is that after a period of adjustment, people will respect your right to be different in different walks of life. They'll understand that it's possible, and indeed desirable, to be reliable and professional at work while still being immature with your kids and occasionally irresponsible with your friends. What really needs to change is the need to maintain the appearance of being different people (because you're always you, unless you have severe psychological issues you aren't really different people). People need to understand that what I do at home and what I do at work needn't overlap. It's just an extension of the adjustment that started with dress down - an understanding that wearing jeans didn't make me any less smart than wearing a suit. People will understand that playing Mario Kart while drunk with my friends doesn't make me less able than if I spent that time reading Dickens.
Tuna-Fish 16y ago
The problem is, there are people who especially want to connect the different fronts you have right now, and are potentially willing to pay a large amount for it (for example, employers and possible mates), while your teenage exploits are not really interesting.
Qz 16y ago
* In the current Facebook and Google Indexing style of amassing information, there is no way for me to do this.* This isn't really true. If you want to be known as a different person, be that different person. Whether your online 'persona' catches up is not the same thing. Your online persona is not you. People who mistake one for the other were probably not worth knowing to begin with.
- Qz 16y ago
  Okay, maybe the last sentence was a little melodramatic, but the point stands.
sdrinf 16y ago
> However, I have no way to separate my past, present and future or the different people that I want to be known as right now. Yes there is. I wrote about it a year ago -finally demand is catching up with that :) http://superuser.com/questions/29177/best-practices-for-managing-virtual-personae/29193#29193 http://superuser.com/questions/29177/best-practices-for-mana...
theBobMcCormick 16y ago
People in small towns never had this luxury. Everyone knows everything about you. It sounds like in the future, the whole world will be a small town.
itgoon 16y ago
Shameless blog plug. http://itgoon.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-want-online-persona-manager.html http://itgoon.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-want-online-persona-man...

mmaunder 16y ago

Spectacular! Love the subtle reference to The Second Coming in the last graph. Mr Gibson you continue to capture, distill and serve up the essence of cyberspace.

sabat 16y ago
I cannot imagine why this legitimate comment would be voted down.
- three14 16y ago
  Without this comment, I wouldn't have given the parent a second glance. And without that, I wouldn't have realized that "slouching towards" is a phrase I easily recognized without being able to recognize the source. So some googling (hah!) later, I found the text of The Second Coming by Yeats here: http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html http://www.potw.org/archive/potw351.html And it turns out, as the GP says, that Gibson is making a wonderful and highly relevant reference to the poem.
  - sabat 16y ago
    It's not obvious now, but when I came across the parent comment, it was at -2. Don't understand the hate.

fwdbureau 16y ago

The funny thing about all this is that since the beginning of the internet, no data privacy issues were ever raised, and that at some point (i may be wrong, but symbolically i would say it started when facebook became really huge) it became a real topic. Coincidentally, facebook becoming huge marked the moment when everybody started to use their real names instead of nicknames. Maybe it's time to do the math, and start wondering if using your real name for every post, every comment, every little lolcat action you take online is really worth signing it with your real name. Returning to nicknames for most of your online appearances would probably render Mr Schmidt's point moot

powrtoch 16y ago
Not really. Most people use the same username or a slight variation thereof for everything they do online. If I read a LiveJournal post you write, I can probably Google your username and discover 90% of your contributions to the web instantly. From all that data I can probably learn enough about you to be scary (where you live, who you hang out with, hobbies, past relationships...), and Google itself could learn basically anything. Of course all of this varies person to person, but it's already known to be an effective heuristic by the password-stealing community. Point being: we live in a time of powerful data mining algorithms, and they're only going to get better. Anonymity does not come easy.
- fwdbureau 16y ago
  Sure (i just googled my favourite username, and found indeed some pretty old stuff that i'd rather keep forgotten). But listing all the appearances of your online persona is one thing, being able to search for your real-life name and retrieve all the embarrassing info attached to it is another. I'm not saying privacy-conscious persons should obfuscate absolutely everything they publish, but considering how things work, the least anyone should do is to make the retrieval of such information a bit more difficult.
locopati 16y ago
I would mark your 'at some point' as pretty early on in the life of the WWW. When web bugs were first introduced (1995? 1997?), there was a huge hew & cry, much along the lines of what we see on HN every time Facebook does something stupid with their privacy settings. The difference is that web bugs was one of the first times some of the implications of the connectedness of the web started to break through the initial excitement/confusion about this (then) brand new thing. Now nobody blinks about web bugs (excepting that big report a while back - Wash Post? - about just how many of the things many sites use - but I don't think that report was new info to anyone involved in the tech side of the web).

kingkawn 16y ago

In case you didn't get it, he really wants a genie.

doron 16y ago

The Top down transparency imposed by Google, facebook etc (as well as the increased surveillance by other entities) seems to be tempered by a bottom up demand for State and corporate secrets being leaked in increased frequency (WikiLeaks etc..) It will be interesting to see how transparency (by design or not) will effect corporate governance and state behavior.

code_duck 16y ago
Yeah, nice how there's a double standard at work. The government wants to have free access to all of our phone calls, emails, stored digital files and heck, even houses, as well as store images, fingerprints and even DNA of each citizen, but on the other hand, they insist that their own privacy is paramount and even filming a police officer can be a crime.

code_duck 16y ago

Is the first quote totally out of context, or does Eric Schmidt seem more stupid, creepy and horrible every day? I've always liked Google a good bit, but I'd be prepared to put them in the 'as bad as microsoft or worse' category, based on their CEO, if he doesn't go away or stop talking soon.