5 ms·

Creepy things Eric Schmidt has said

23 points by wensing 16y ago

Keyframe 16y ago
“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 16y ago
  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 http://www.google.org/flutrends/about/how.html
- jplewicke 16y ago
  My guess is that they're not talking so much about the broad market as about being able to predict individual stock returns relative to the market. Having access to search-, browsing-, and click-streams of most people doing research on stocks could give them a strong indication of the realtime supply of and demand for stocks before individual and institutional investors execute transactions. My search history is probably the single best record of what I've been thinking about, and any competitor with access to it would have an excellent idea of what trades I have planned. If all Goldman Sachs traders were even stochastically telepathic, they'd have an unbeatable edge in the market.
jasonlotito 16y ago
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.
- face 16y ago
  Not to mention that usually the second part is left out, where he actually warns people that Google might be legally obligated to provide some information to the authorities.
- apl 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago
        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 16y ago
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.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
nck4222 16y ago
Even out of context, a couple of those aren't really creepy.
- pmiller2 16y ago
  I agree. Most of these (clearly out of context) quotations I found merely boneheadedly naive rather than creepy.
haberman 16y ago
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-Call-Transcript/41199/281 http://www.123jump.com/earnings-calls/Google-Q3-Earnings-Cal... And this was a conversation with investors, not privacy advocates.
spiffworks 16y ago
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 16y ago
  > 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.

23 points by wensing 16y ago

“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 16y ago
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 http://www.google.org/flutrends/about/how.html
jplewicke 16y ago
My guess is that they're not talking so much about the broad market as about being able to predict individual stock returns relative to the market. Having access to search-, browsing-, and click-streams of most people doing research on stocks could give them a strong indication of the realtime supply of and demand for stocks before individual and institutional investors execute transactions. My search history is probably the single best record of what I've been thinking about, and any competitor with access to it would have an excellent idea of what trades I have planned. If all Goldman Sachs traders were even stochastically telepathic, they'd have an unbeatable edge in the market.

jasonlotito 16y ago

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.

face 16y ago
Not to mention that usually the second part is left out, where he actually warns people that Google might be legally obligated to provide some information to the authorities.
apl 16y ago
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 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 16y ago

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.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

nck4222 16y ago

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

pmiller2 16y ago
I agree. Most of these (clearly out of context) quotations I found merely boneheadedly naive rather than creepy.

haberman 16y ago

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-Call-Transcript/41199/281 http://www.123jump.com/earnings-calls/Google-Q3-Earnings-Cal... And this was a conversation with investors, not privacy advocates.

spiffworks 16y ago

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 16y ago
> 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.