This attitude makes me so off the charts angry, I struggle to put it into words. I think Jews in Germany in the 1920s didn't think they were doing anything wrong, or feel a need to actively hide it.
Eric Schmidt's concept of privacy is so focused on the sort term where we live in free countries. Who knows what the future holds in store?
Imagine if in 50-100 years the political situation gets really bad in the US and they decide to pass such a law. That hypothetical future government could simply get all the data from companies like Google and pinpoint their targets with scary accuracy. Imagine being jailed for web searches that you have done decades prior.
As a trans person, that's the kind of things that keep me up at night. Especially since the ads that Google are presenting to me recently shifted and my shadow profile is clearly tagged as "trans" now.
Sure, but only in the minds of people who don't even know themselves, and can't make a coherent argument to save their lifes. They confuse the "data" they have on things with the things themselves, not to mention people -- same noobs doing the same shit, different day.
Schmidt and Google claim to be "progressive" but that kind of rationale of "nothing to hide" would mean that every progressive movement would have been shut down in its early stages had this kind of tech and surveillance been available at the time because it went against what was currently judged as right by the people in power
I don’t see how this implies anything about a particular political ideology being more virtuous. Why would you even think that?
Nobody thinks they're evil, people can rationalize all sorts of crazy behavior.
I do, because evil is banal. Rationalizing crazy behavior is what evil usually looks like. Larger evils occur when "trivial" problems are ignored, allowing the deviant behavior to be normalized. Intentions are not relevant, because it's easy to rationalize away the craziest of behaviors.
"No one involved in an extralegal activity thinks of themselves as nefarious. I'm a businessman, okay?" - Quark, DS9 S6E25
It's the classic dilemma: "People ask 'Can we do this?' and rarely ask 'Should we do this?'"