5 ms·

This reminds me of a quote by Eric Schmidt : "One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market..." Eric Schmidt con

This reminds me of a quote by Eric Schmidt : "One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market..." Eric Schmidt continues, "and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that." They probably have thousands of employees who can access this information, I think it would be foolish to think that absolutely none of them does it for personal purposes.

rayiner 12y ago
The purpose of the law is precisely to make Eric Schmidt say what he did. In general, the law can't hope to prevent undesirable conduct, but only create social norms that prevent undesirable conduct at scale. Laws against murder won't stop jealous lovers from killing spouses, but do stop people from turning murder into a business. They won't stop casual drug use, but do stop Wal-Mart from getting into the meth business. Etc.
voidlogic 12y ago
So long as they used public information- why would it be illegal?
- secalex 12y ago
  I once had an interesting discussion with a tech-savvy criminal attorney about whether security researchers could trade public equities using early indicators of compromise or private knowledge of 0-day (gained from outside the company, not under NDA). She thought about it a bit and said "The insider trading laws are so broad that if the US Attorney didn't like it they would make it illegal, and if you had talked to anybody about it they would go down for conspiracy." My interactions with the criminal legal system as an expert witness since then have only reinforced my belief in Harry Silverglate's axiom that pretty much every US adult is merely an un-indicted Federal felon living their lives at the mercy of the thousands of AUSAs who could plunge them into a living hell.
  - olefoo 12y ago
    And that is a problem, that we should solve.
- kragen 12y ago
  They were talking about using information from the stream of search queries issuing from each company, as I remember the story. So they'd get advance knowledge of layoffs, diseases among key personnel, that kind of thing.
jay_kyburz 12y ago
You know, any user can probably use those tools in adsense (or is it adwords) to monitor how popular search terms are and make similar predictions. If searches for X brand is way up one month then you might be able to predict that x band will have a good quarter.
linuxhansl 12y ago
It's only illegal if that is based on data that is not publicly available, right?
kragen 12y ago
The way I heard the story was that they decided that it would be evil, rather than illegal. But I think that might have been pre-Schmidt.

rayiner 12y ago

The purpose of the law is precisely to make Eric Schmidt say what he did. In general, the law can't hope to prevent undesirable conduct, but only create social norms that prevent undesirable conduct at scale. Laws against murder won't stop jealous lovers from killing spouses, but do stop people from turning murder into a business. They won't stop casual drug use, but do stop Wal-Mart from getting into the meth business. Etc.

voidlogic 12y ago

So long as they used public information- why would it be illegal?

secalex 12y ago
I once had an interesting discussion with a tech-savvy criminal attorney about whether security researchers could trade public equities using early indicators of compromise or private knowledge of 0-day (gained from outside the company, not under NDA). She thought about it a bit and said "The insider trading laws are so broad that if the US Attorney didn't like it they would make it illegal, and if you had talked to anybody about it they would go down for conspiracy." My interactions with the criminal legal system as an expert witness since then have only reinforced my belief in Harry Silverglate's axiom that pretty much every US adult is merely an un-indicted Federal felon living their lives at the mercy of the thousands of AUSAs who could plunge them into a living hell.
- olefoo 12y ago
  And that is a problem, that we should solve.
kragen 12y ago
They were talking about using information from the stream of search queries issuing from each company, as I remember the story. So they'd get advance knowledge of layoffs, diseases among key personnel, that kind of thing.

jay_kyburz 12y ago

You know, any user can probably use those tools in adsense (or is it adwords) to monitor how popular search terms are and make similar predictions. If searches for X brand is way up one month then you might be able to predict that x band will have a good quarter.

linuxhansl 12y ago

It's only illegal if that is based on data that is not publicly available, right?

kragen 12y ago

The way I heard the story was that they decided that it would be evil, rather than illegal. But I think that might have been pre-Schmidt.