Hacker News Reader

Comment by joshes | Hacker News Reader

> Let's face it, if they were doing something legal they wouldn't care if they were getting videotaped.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once said, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." It was a preposterous statement assuming that the only value of privacy is to protect one's self when they do something morally, ethically or legally wrong. It was remarkably incorrect and offensive and everyone (rightly) lambasted him for it.

Your statement is eerily similar. I'm not commenting on what Google has done here. But to say that they wouldn't care about being video taped if they were not doing something illegal does not make complete sense.

View on HN

I agree that people ought to be entitled to keep secrets. But Google is not a person, it is a publicly traded corporation which wields economic power on the same scale as state governments. I don't argue that they aren't entitled to secrets, but if they are, it is for different reasons and the comparison of those rights is misleading.

Entitled or not, it's clear that organizations have many reasons to want to keep secrets.

I would agree. I do think that corporations should not be treated in precisely the same way that individual persons are treated. Corporations have (arguably) far too much power as is.

But I think that the level of privacy that allows one to request to not be videotaped against their will extends to corporations in some circumstances. Unless there is something truly fishy happening here, and there is not much evidence that there is, I believe that Google is within their liberties to be upset over this.

On the contrary, since Schmidt was actually running Google when this incident happened, it would seem to be perfectly applicable. <sarcasm> Or are you saying that Schmidt only meant it for others and not for Google itself? </sarcasm>

I believe Schmidt's statement was about activities online.

I believe his statement also applied to things like your friends uploading embarrassing pictures of you and things like that, which is essentially paralleled here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com