From
UK Telegraph --
Young will have to change names to escape 'cyber past' warns Google's Eric Schmidt --
The private lives of young people are now so well documented on the internet that many will have to change their names on reaching adulthood, Google’s CEO has claimed.
Eric Schmidt suggested that young people should be entitled to change their identity to escape their misspent youth, which is now recorded in excruciating detail on social networking sites such as Facebook.
"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," Mr Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal.
In an interview Mr Schmidt said he believed that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrasssing photographs and material stored on their friends' social media sites.
The 55-year-old also predicted that in the future, Google will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives.
Using profiles of it customers and tracking their locations through their smart phones, it will be able to provide live updates on their surroundings and inform them of tasks they need to do.
"We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.
"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
He suggested, as an example, that because Google would know “roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are”, it could remind users what groceries they needed to buy when passing a shop.
The comments are not the first time Mr Schmidt has courted controversy over the wealth of personal information people reveal on the internet. Last year, he notoriously remarked: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Earlier this year, Google was condemned by the privacy watchdogs of 10 countries for showing a “disappointing disregard” for safeguarding private information of its users.
In a letter to Mr Schmidt, Britain's Information Commissioner Chris Graham joined his counterparts in countries including Canada, France, Germany and Italy, in raising concerns over its Street View and Buzz social networking services.
First of all, I must say how I hate this
Obama-worshiping, hypocritical,
"Net Neutrality" pushing asshole! I do
love their copyFREE software though... Cheese in a mousetrap? Maybe. My philosophy on this issue follows a paraphrasing of
Sun Tzu, or something similar - "it is strategically beneficial to eat your enemy's lunch, just as long as it isn't poisoned". And Google doesn't have any hooks into
me! One can switch search engines / fork chromium / etc at any time. Sure, they know about me Googling for images of
Jesusfagporn, for example, but so does everybody else!
And that's where the philosophy of
RealNamesPlease comes in. Secrets are a liability, honesty is an asset! There is no offline Alex Libman that is pure and sheltered and distinct from the online Alex Libman! I
yam what I yam! And you should to! I mean you yar what you yar! I'd like to see more libertarians abandon their illusions of privacy, end all the pointless secrecy, and just come out of the closet. If people don't accept you as you are, then they don't deserve to be a part of your life anyway. There's an old
Russian proverb, "take care of clothes since [when they are] new, take care of [your] honor since [you are] young". Changing names wouldn't do jack squat to fool reputation wikis that would inevitably exist in a free society. Take responsibility for who you are, and reciprocate onto others the understanding that you'd want others to have toward you!
The government will use people's fear for their privacy to strengthen its power over item. At the same time, it will also use their fear of anonymity of others. Take a look at the "There Ought to Be a Law" section of
Richard Stalinman's Web-site, for example. He wants Mommy Government to "foil
companies like Blackwater and
Philip Morris that change their names to escape the odium of their past deeds". The links in the quotation are in the original, and they are a prime example of why this isn't necessary - information sources like
prWatch.org and
SourceWatch.org already exist to keep track of company name changes and a whole lot more. Sure, those two examples have a huge socialist bias, like the rest of society does today, but that is a battle that we'll have to fight in the marketplace of ideas, and if the fight is fair then eventually we'll win! As technology improves, your
augmented reality glasses might even alert you whenever you see "
Xe Services" or "
Altria Group" names, logos, products, connected individuals, etc, etc, etc.
I have seen the future,
brother, and it's 100% transparent, for better or worse, no matter if you sell your soul to an all-powerful government or not!