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Eric Schmidt: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." People have taken this different

• whyte_mackay 8y ago
  A case of "do as I say and not as I do". Besides Eric Schmidt is powerful and rich enough to stop people from talking. Not exactly a level playing field there. Maybe Eric should not have a private Instagram account which follows young models. Maybe Eric should not ask Google to delete results about his political donations.
• blattimwind 8y ago
  > Eric Schmidt: "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place." Would he extend this idea to clandestince agencies?
  • roywiggins 8y ago
    Or Google's trade secrets...
• anewguy9000 8y ago
  how is that advice? if you have x maybe you shouldnt have x lol
• rando444 8y ago
  Unfortunately we live in a world where authoritarian governments still exist.
• Zarath 8y ago
  Better not be openly gay in Russia! Or openly gay 15 years ago and have them scrape old data and find out.
  • tomcam 8y ago
    Or openly conservative in the USA
    • markholmes 8y ago
      I’m sorry, but what? Are you suggesting that being conservative in the United States is somehow equivalent to being gay in Russia?
      • tomcam 8y ago
        Yep. Assuming you live in SV, would you like to disprove me by putting a TRUMP 2020 sign on your lawn?
        • markholmes 8y ago
          Sure, because that won’t have me thrown in jail or possibly even killed.
    • smt88 8y ago
      Conservatives control our federal and most state governments. They recently had control of all three branches of the federal government. The idea that conservatives are a disenfranchised or endangered group is absolutely ludicrous.
      • dgzl 8y ago
        I disagree entirely. Being a young white male with some moderately conservative ideals in [West coast city] makes you entirely unlikable by most people who find out. This is my first hand experience. Being conservative is the new taboo.
        • nl 8y ago
          In Russia you can get to prison for being gay. In West Coast US a few people might refuse to date you. These don't seem like the same thing.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• roywiggins 8y ago
  He's making a powerful argument against... trade secrets? Or are only corporations allowed to zealously guard their secrets, and natural persons just have to assume those corporations will leak their petty ones?
• schaefer 8y ago
  ^^^ VikingCoder: That's simultaneously an admirable ethical stance... ...and total BS. Put your money where your mouth is. Post your full banking and personally identifying details immediately, without hesitation or regret. If you;d rather not, maybe you actually agree that not all issues of privacy come down to ethics. Some details of a person's life really do deserve privacy.
  • jen20 8y ago
    Furthermore, for Eric Schmidt (of all people) to be taken seriously when he says this kind of thing, he should publish all of his personal data too.
  • VikingCoder 8y ago
    I think everyone here is misinterpreting what I meant, and I take full responsibility for that. I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies. I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can. Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish. --- We all deserve privacy, and we are all almost completely denied privacy, by design, by hundreds of systems we use daily. I highly recommend the novels "Daemon" and "Freedom" by Daniel Suarez, which explore just how vulnerable our digital infrastructure is.
    • WilliamEdward 8y ago
      The problem is with the initial line of reasoning: "If you don't like x, don't do x". It's the biggest load of crap that everyone buys into for some reason. It's like saying if you don't like air pollution, move to a different location. Like yes, true, but also I want to improve the situation in my current location, not abandon it. That's how people feel on the internet, and you're asking them to throw in the towel completely and accept they'll never be able to share anything on the internet in private. You're even going as far as to say if they want something private they shouldn't be doing it. Both of these two things are untrue, but especially the idea that technology is inherently un-private and can never be so.
• abj 8y ago
  This advice works great if a person is in a majority. The problem happens when a person is in a minority. Imagine if in America in the 1910's a person has a reasonable dissenting opinion like, "I think all citizens should have equal civil rights." If I was there I would be hesitant to attach to this opinion to my public identify. Especially if my employment relied on me voicing an opinion in agreement with the majority. This seems to have a chilling effect that prevents anyone from voicing an opinion that is not already close to being in the majority.
  • dragonwriter 8y ago
    > This advice works great if a person is in a majority I think you mean “group with dominant social power”; that's often confused with majority because of the predominant pattern of race/ethnic/religious (but not economic class) oppression in Western Europe and North America, but consider apartheid South Africa.
    • abj 8y ago
      That's a great point. It makes more sense to use "group with dominant social power" instead.
  • VikingCoder 8y ago
    I think everyone here is misinterpreting what I meant, and I take full responsibility for that. I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies. I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can. Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish or control.
• nlawalker 8y ago
  My favorite response to this is the one called out on the story a few months ago about Keybase's exploding message feature[1]: > I have nothing to hide > Because no one is trying to hurt you [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17357992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17357992
• magicalist 8y ago
  > Eric Schmidt You forgot the second part of that quote that's much more relevant to this conversation: > "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place, but 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. It is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities." Just need to add "we are all subject to buggy permissions APIs" :/
• sonnyblarney 8y ago
  ""If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place."" ... Says the billionaire to the gay man in Nigeria who could be killed if this were public knowledge? ... Says the billionaire to the journalist with private sources doing legit work? ... Says the billionaire to the person who votes 'ABC' but works in company who votes 'XYZ' and hate those 'ABC voters' and who could lose their job due to blatant political discrimination? I quite fundamentally disagree with this concept as it abnegates the very nature of privacy. Different words, ideas, have utterly different meanings in different social contexts and in different cultures, different regimes. It's a deeply cynical quote from him, I think, that facilitates his own 'bottom line' i.e. as someone who makes billions from the exchange of 'public' information. "We've lost our ability to keep secrets." It's true that privacy is harder but it's definitely not true that we can't keep secrets. We control technology and the internet, and we can definitely 'choose privacy', it's mostly a matter of will, and the pragmatic acceptance that it won't be perfect. Privacy was taken for granted, but I believe we should recognize it as a basic right. It'll be a little bit harder for example in the digital age, but we can absolutely have it, we just need to make the choice.
  • VikingCoder 8y ago
    I think everyone here is misinterpreting what I meant, and I take full responsibility for that. I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies. I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can. Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish. --- I care deeply about all those people. I hate that computers have been weaponized against them. It's a tragedy to go from the optimism of improving the world with computers and networks, to where we are today. I fundamentally disagree with you that we can achieve privacy. Your ISP knows too much. Your phone carrier knows too much. Your DNS knows too much. The Credit Agencies know too much. Your CPU is too insecure. Your OS, browser, and other apps are, too. We keep turning decentralized / federated services into centralized ones. Every ad network knows too much. Your browser knows too much. It's too easy to identify you nearly uniquely from your browser, even if you try to stop it. TOR has a lot of problems, and exit nodes are the devil. Blockchain is too easy to track. Keyloggers are far too common. SMS verification and recovery are the worst things ever. Face Tracking is entirely too viable. License Plate tracking is entirely too viable. Credit Card companies know too much. Banks know too much. Employers know too much. Every online commerce site knows too much. Our phones know too much. Polling companies know too much. The political parties know too much. The NSA knows entirely too much. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Microsoft, all know too much. I think things like Kenton Varda's Sandstorm are a good step. I hope to see more things like them. If you want something to be secret, don't let a computer know you're doing it. Any computer. When you say "we just need to make the choice," I don't believe you any more. I think that's kind of like saying Communist Utopia, or Libertarian Utopia can exist. All that needs to happen is all of human nature needs to change. :( I think tech folks like us need to work our asses off to create systems with real privacy that are just as good or better than the ones that destroy privacy. Because if they're remotely worse, in basically any way, they won't catch on. Note that Facebook will be almost entirely impossible to replace. Because of the Network effect.
• PhasmaFelis 8y ago
  Am I missing something? That seems to be equivalent to "the innocent have nothing to fear" in assuming that no one is ever persecuted who doesn't deserve it.
  • VikingCoder 8y ago
    I think everyone here is misinterpreting what I meant, and I take full responsibility for that. I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies. I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can. Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish. (PS, that's anyone.)
• ajnin 8y ago
  This is an incredibly oppressive, totalitarian way to put things. This is literally Big Brother thinking, which says a lots about the core values of Google. You have to act exclusively in the way that society deems acceptable. Even in privacy, in places you seem safe, even in your own home, with friends or family, because someone, some device, may be watching you at any time, opening you to the judgment of others and the law.
  • VikingCoder 8y ago
    I think everyone here is misinterpreting what I meant, and I take full responsibility for that. I think we thought of computers and the internet as our allies in privacy. They are not. They are our enemies. I think we should stop trusting computers, any computers, as much as we possibly can. Especially if you're in a minority that your government may try to punish. We ARE in an oppressive surveillance state. Our government is tracking us. Every business is tracking us. I highly recommend the novel "Daemon" and sequel "Freedom" by Daniel Suarez. He's a former Security consultant, who wanted to wake people up to how fragile our digital infrastructure is.