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Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

Opinions and attitudes can change a lot in ten years.

Is there any indication that his has changed? Did he apologize for his previous remarks or recant them in any way? If someone tells me they want to undermine my rights, I'm not in the habit of later giving them the benefit of the doubt because "attitudes can change".

This story is about Brad Smith. Attitudes can change, but he probably didn't body-swap Schmidt

Just so people have a ready response for Schmidt's thoughtless statement:

1) I don't want potentially naked fotos or conversations of my family online. Do you?

2) Regulations and customs change over time. Something ok 10 years ago can be damning tomorrow.

3) How do you maintain privacy of medical and lawyer conversations when anything can be released without permission?

Ironically, I had the same conversation with a lawyer ("I have nothing to hide.") who had teenage daughters. It really didn't sink in until I gave him those examples.

The ideal case is not sending naked fotos online, if you'd be embarrassed by that kind of thing. and I would never trust any kind of technology to keep medical or legal secrets. I generally assume that anything I submit to a remote server may be compromised and released at some point.

You always have to place absolute trust in someone, even Google. It doesn't matter what Eric Schmidt says. You're trusting dozens of companies with your privacy and your secrets every day, whether you realize it or not

> I would never trust any kind of technology to keep medical or legal secrets

Paper too, is in a sense, technology.

It is, but paper cannot be compromised in large volumes by remote actors.

Since most techies seem out of touch with how physical data storage used to work...

Your medical records may be a ream or two of paper. They don't get stored at your doctor's office, your doctor's office requests the records it needs on a daily basis. Medical couriers exist to handle emergency requests. Your data is stored in a warehouse with perhaps hundreds of employees. The threat model is different, not absent -- everybody from your doctor's receptionist to the warehouse workers have access, and can read or modify your data.

It doesn't seem fair to presume Schmidt forgot that people must use the bathroom and sometimes bathe or change clothes and such. To bring in a little good faith, perhaps we should amend Schmidt's statement to include the ending "...using Google's products". Then you are basically supporting what the statement says. One indeed shouldn't use their free cloud-based products for your sensitive communications with unlimited downside if there is a breach. You aren't paying them to take on that liability and they aren't promising the needed level of protection.

[insert that Upton Sinclair quote here]

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