Eric Schmidt: “We Know Where You Are, We Know What You Like”
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
On the other hand, I don't really feel like there's an actual "evilness" behind the words to match up with the "evil" sound of the words. Someone truly interested in leveraging the potential evil would hardly going around making gawk-inducing statements like this. It's almost cartoon villain-ish (and thus gets headlines).
I've tended to think that it's the "well-meaning but poorly-worded summary of what the engineers are saying that contains poorly glossed, uncomfortable truths" explanation that's behind these statements. But that seems a little weak; shouldn't the CEO be better at that than Schmidt is? (Or if he truly isn't, why is he still CEO?)
So it occurred to me reading this one, that what if it is that Schmidt is deliberately "bungling" to try to warn us to caution, in his positive-spin, pro-company, CEO kind of way? Maybe the "foot in mouth" is precise and intentional, designed to get press and shake people up on the topic?
To sidestep the (valid but long and out of scope) discussion of "well, why doesn't he fix the problem?", from a business perspective, he could hardly full-stop the company on data aggregation. Even if he did, Google isn't alone in its data aggregation and more companies are jumping in on the game all the time.
Maybe Schmidt is actually risking the flak to make the point. Maybe he's not as culturally different from "the Good Google" as many seem to think he is. Or maybe he really does have an anti-gravity ray with which he will steal the moon and Miss Penelope Pureheart, bwahaha.
That's how I feel: if he makes some hand-waving denial then everyone will assume he's lying, so it's better to admit what the potential reach could be openly, and then address what the positives could be. I think their biggest problem from a service delivery standpoint is the difficulty of working with Google in a domain-specific mode. For a while they were experimenting with letting you up/downvote search results, and I was hoping that was going to converge with some of their set/collection tools so that you could build very specific filters (more than would be practical using regex) and save them for later use.
I wouldn't for example want Nazi Germany to know that I am Jewish. That of course is an example, I am neither in Nazi Germany nor Jewish. But I suppose if I were Jewish, I would not care that the Israeli government knows I am Jewish.
I do not care what Google knows about me. I do not care either that Google knows where I am. I too roughly know where most visitors to my website are. Indeed sometimes I know where they are precisely.
If google wants to offer a service to remind me to buy milk, I might use it. I do not think that machines are at such a level yet where they can control me and tell me what to do next. If it reminds me to buy milk I might or might not go and buy milk. Indeed, possibly having a little google robot to go and buy my milk would be the science fiction future.
If however google decides all the sudden to tell for example my employer that I have said that I hate them, that is an invasion of privacy. As it would be if they told my girlfriend I slept with someone, or if they told my friend I lied to them. Now that would be the fiction future, or possibly the non fiction past of 1984.
Then you can't afford to let the Weimar Republic gather records saying you're Jewish, not because they're untrustworthy but because collating pre-existing data (gee, thanks, IBM) is where the Nazis got their lists.
Eric Schmidt: "A near-term future in which you don’t forget anything, because the computer remembers. You’re never lost."
Evernote.com: "Capture anything. Access anywhere. Find things fast".
Both paint close to the same thing, but with different colors. A great illustration of how much the good perception matters. And being an underdog maybe too.
I think I found a way to put it differently: in one case it is the user that lets the company collect the data, in the other case it is the company that lets the user collect the data.
To make the data equivalently useful, I would want to make it the most complete - so asymptotically I would get the same data set collected in both cases. But if this all is done with my consent, I would feel more in control about it - even if "yes to all" is more efficient for me.
So he should get a PR person to rephrase that statement until it sounds good, but no one understands what it really means? I fail to see how that statement could be rephrased and TechCrunch doesn't offer any suggestions either.
It is like the difference between Netflix announcing "We track everything you watch" versus "We can recommend movies you might like, because we track everything you watch".
There's nothing unfair about honest editorializing.
We Love Big Google!...wait, or is it 'Like' now?
Schmidt seems so different than the rest of Google. I feel like there are at least 2 internal cultures going on over there.
Page and Brin are hackers. Schmidt, while decorated with a Technical past, is a CEO. There are enough articles going around right now that say what a CEO's job is.
I figure a lot of the hackers here may not have the direct experience hearing someone talk solely about making money - taking the product and the quality out of the equation completely. So my comment comes off as abrasive or inflammatory, even though its most likely the reality.
Schmidt doesn't say "how can we make G-Mail great?" in meetings. He says "how can we be synonymous with the web, how can we be the absolute end-point for users and their technology?"