Privacy: Not
Staff writer Elinor Mills wrote a balanced article about personal privacy in the time of Internet search for online news aggregator CNET. The facet of personal privacy that the article primarily discussed was the ability to keep personal information out of Internet search results. Since Google has the bulk of the Internet search market, Google was the primary focus, but as the article noted, overall, "the issues with Google are not any different from the issues you have with Yahoo, Microsoft and others."
Mills began her article showing some of the results of thirty minutes of googling Google's CEO Eric Schmidt. She came up with an idea of his net worth (North of $1.5 Billion), the amount of Google stock he'd sold (at least $140 million), a political affair he'd attended with his wife (a $10,000 per-plate fund raiser for Al Gore), where he lives (affluent Atherton, California), and some of his hobbies (attending the Burning Man festival, flying a private plane).
All this sounds like a pretty good life to me, and information that is not all that sensitive. It's not as if it were social security numbers, children's names and schools, or things of that sort.
If I were offered the job, the loss of privacy that this kind of revelation entails would be a small price. Actually, it was already revealed - in a simple Google search. Mills merely repeated it.
If you or I had nothing worse than these facts about Eric Schmidt to be revealed, we might not fear loss of control of our personal information very much. (Personally, I monkey with algorithms, race fast cars and women, and am wanted in twenty countries, but that's a different story!)
However, Google's rather foolish reaction was fierce and in the tradition of lesse majesty. The head of Google's public relations department, David Krane, called the editor in chief at CNET to complain, and then announced that all CNET reporters were banned from talking to Google for a year (actually, this is Google's loss more than CNET's). Krane later told the New York Times that he wasn't authorized to discuss the matter at all. Here's the New York Times account of the flap.
What conclusions should be drawn from the affair? I've already noted that Google's do no evil motto is by definition an empty mantra when applied to an aggressive public corporation.
It's also pretty clear that whether you are a prince or a pauper it is most likely that a great deal of information can be found out about you using online research tools. Indeed, this was part of Ms. Mills's reason for using Eric Schmidt as her case-in-point for her privacy article.
Is this loss of control over one's personal information a good or bad thing? It's both - and there's no hiding from the fact that eggregious information dispersal about people is a fact of modern life. This is not going away, in fact there is only going to more information availability as time goes by. Indeed, this is the premise that Google's business rests upon.
Savvy citizens of the Internet recognize the widespread availability of personal information as an opportunity (although, of course, one can't ignore the potential downsides). They use the opportunity to present themselves the way they want to be seen. They also know that those they work or socialize with can't really expect to keep secrets - not always a bad thing.
When the privacy double-edged sword fell close to home, Google's CEO Schmidt failed the basic test: that of understanding that information, in the old cliche, wants to be free, and that the same rules apply to Google insiders as to the rest of us.
Posted by Harold Davis at August 30, 2005 10:40 AM
