Google's CEO Clears the Air

prostoalex writes "Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat down with PC Magazine to discuss some of the current issues swirling around Google, such as China and censorship, growth of the video content on the Internet, Microsoft's planned move into online ads, working with AOL and Internet neutrality." From the article: "Schmidt was quick to say that the acquisition of Writely was not meant to create a competitor to Microsoft Office, which he said solves a complicated and important problem of work productivity. Writely is a server-based editing system where you can move your files around, he said, and there are places where a rich text editor is useful in Google."

Comments

Similar article on the BBC

[Paul Townend]

I suspect that this BBC article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4816848.stm

was made based on the same meeting....

Creepy:

[naught]

from tfa: "He said Google ads are very targetable, because Google knows a lot about the person surfing, especially if they have used personal search or logged into a service such as Gmail."

not to mention possibly what crimes you've committed. i find myself suddenly not wanting to ever search on the word 'torrent' again.

Google Acqusistions

[Grant29]

Google keeps acquiring lots of small companies. Who wants to bet that these things are all inteneded for a much larger product that we all assume? Looks like they could eventually captalize on many different markets. Search will probably eventually become what they're least known for.
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I don't agree totally...

[garcia]

"The technology we have is incredibly empowering to citizens," he said. For all the countries we don't like, he suggested we might their change behavior more by giving their citizens PCs, fast connections, and access.

It doesn't empower citizens of countries that do everything they can to proxy out that information. While I 99% agree with what Google did in China, I don't agree that giving citizens PCs, connections, and access will stop their governments from doing what they do.

Fuck, the USA is supposedly "free" and "open" and we have quite a bit of the population with access and yet we just let our leaders take FAT SHITS in front of our faces and then smile when they waft the stentch towards us.

Simple Survey

[webword]

Do you trust Google less today than one year ago?

Feel free to explain why. My point of the "survey" is that I think people trust Google less now than in the past. It is taking more and more effort for Google to keep the hearts and minds of the world. There is more speculation. There are more conspiracy theories.

Re:Simple Survey

[ajs]

I trust any company less than the identical company with 100 fewer employees, so my answer to that question would have to be "yes". However, I'd also have to point out that when compared to ANY OTHER FOR-PROFIT COMPANY OF ITS SIZE, I trust Google far, far more. This relative trust is highly significant to Google's business, and until they do something to violate that trust (no, censoring Chinese content doesn't violate that trust because it provides more information to the Chinese than they would have had if Google had refused), I will continue to use their products over Microsoft's, Yahoo's and their other competitors'.

Re:Simple Survey

[MrNougat]

I would say that over the last year, I have seen Google put in some interesting situations. They've made those situations fairly public prior to deciding what to do about them, taken time to make a choice, chosen what could arguably be the lesser of evils, and made that public, too.

Examples: Google gets beat up all the time for tailoring its web searches to suit the Chinese gov't on google.cn. What about Yahoo and MSN? I'm sure that they tailor search results at teir China sites, too. Google gets beat up for having to turn over data to the Justice Dept, and yet they're the only ones who made any noise about it. I'm sure those same requests were made of other search engines, and that those engines happily turned over the requested data without informing the public at all.

Do I trust Google more now than I did a year ago? Yes, I do. Because they are public about situations of which the public should be aware, while their competitors are uncannily silent.

Personal info as target

[msbmsb]

Also from the article: Schmidt said he saw Writely and other server-based tools as another way to collect and organize the world's data. "All the world's information includes personal information," he noted.

I was a little surprised to not see anything else in there really about privacy concerns, except that users "need to trust that the information won't be abused by Google or by governments".

Privacy concerns

[Baseball_Fan]

One thing that will increase advertising effectiveness, he said, was better targeting of ads. He said Google ads are very targetable, because Google knows a lot about the person surfing, especially if they have used personal search or logged into a service such as Gmail. This he said was true not only of text ads, but for display ads and eventually for video ads as well.

Am I the only one who does not like Google collecting surfing habits or using email to decide what ads to send my way. What other ways can this information be used? Will Google one day sell this information to employers? Will there be enough data that Google can link surfing habits to a real person, not a virtual internet user?

Will credit card companies and banks join a data mining company to share collected information?

Can people imagine if their bank, ISP, and employer joined forces to paint a complete profile of a person? Can that data, when taken as a whole, be used to predict things like how much a person will cost in health insurance, and that data be used to not hire a person?

Re:Privacy concerns

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

There are already a number of companies building profiles of data about everyone and selling it. Unless we get privacy laws passed (fat chance) this will continue. So your bank, ISP, and employer will be collaborating on building a profile of you and they almost certainly will use it in hiring decisions. When employers become large and consolidated, the only way to bargain fairly is for labor to organize and consolidate. This leads to some serious inefficiencies and lots of room for corruption, but it is not like their are any better options.

Re:Privacy concerns

[Zathrus]

Am I the only one who does not like Google collecting surfing habits or using email to decide what ads to send my way.

Yes. You're the only one who has ever had any misgivings over it. I'm so glad you finally said something, because certainly nobody else has ever thought it before.

Seriously - is your tin foil covering your entire body now? Or are you just that much of an egotist?

Will Google one day sell this information to employers?

Not without either violating their privacy policy or significantly changing it. But don't let that get in the way of your paranoia.

Will credit card companies and banks join a data mining company to share collected information?

No that would never happen.

Sorry, I was too lazy to link every single letter to a different data mining company, otherwise I could've included ones that operate predominantly outside of the US (although the big 3 all have non-US operations).

Your concerns on this issue are about 50 years out of date. And, somehow, I doubt that you know that much about the system as a whole either (and yes, I do).

Can people imagine if their bank, ISP, and employer joined forces to paint a complete profile of a person?

A rather large amount of that information, particularly the financial data, is already available. See above. If I pull a report on you from the credit bureaus then I can already tell a great deal about you -- where you live, how badly you are in debt (or if you're not), how much you're paid (roughly), possibly what kind of car you drive.

Can that data, when taken as a whole, be used to predict things like how much a person will cost in health insurance, and that data be used to not hire a person?

Not bloody likely. Even in Right to Work states you'd have a hard time pulling that one off. You might try, but if you were ever found out then you'd lose far, far more in legal bills than you'd ever gain in insurance savings. Not to mention that you'd get your ass sued off for invasion of privacy -- no matter what waivers you had employees (or potential employees) sign.

Torrents are not illegal.

[babbling]

Torrents are not illegal.
The bittorrent protocol is not illegal.
The bittorrent method of distribution is not illegal.
Torrent websites are not illegal.

The distribution, without permission, of files that fall under current copyright is illegal in most, but not all, places in the world.

Furthermore, searching for torrents of files that fall under copyright is not illegal. Downloading the torrents themselves might be illegal, I'm not sure. Downloading the copyrighted material itself, without permission, is always illegal. This has nothing to do with it being a torrent.

I'd say you can safely search for "torrent"...

Is Eric Schmidt still around?

[why-is-it]

Is Eric Schmidt still around? I thought that Steve Ballmer was going to f*cking bury him!

Apparently, he did it once before...

Re:Misinstructed by the example of Cuba

[TopShelf]

While the analogy is a bit of a stretch, the Cuban embargo is still a collosal failure. It hasn't achieved its objective, and doesn't show any signs of doing so in the forseeable future. Why not end it? Just to avoid giving Castro the satisfaction and PR? That's an awfully petty reason to keep a neighbor impoverished.

I would think that free trade and closer US/Cuba ties would help the anti-totalitarian interests there in the long run.

Disappointment sets in

[eSavior]

In a related area, Schmidt said that while the two companies weren't going to offer full interoperability between their instant messaging networks anytime soon, users could expect a single tool that give you access to both Google Talk and AIM in ways similar to how Trillian treats multiple IM networks.

I really hoped all the interoperability talk meant more than a multiprotocal client. It would have been nice for google to put up a jabber server that would allow the jabber world to instant message AIM users say via @aim.com addresses (I hear Apple's iChat works like that). Oh well, thanks google for adding nothing to the instant messaging landscape that gaim/trillian/etc didn't add years ago.

Re:It's always been about the business.

[why-is-it]

And again, greed wins out over morality. Do business, no matter what the cost.

But Google is a publicly traded company now, and there is no place for morality. The board is obligated to act in the best interests of the shareholders. Since there is money to be made in China, Google follows the official party line.

I'm far too cynical to be disappointed any more. Corporations exist to make money and limit the liability of the owners. I'd say that they would kill people if it paid well enough, but we already know about the tobacco industry...

Unfortunately, morality, ethics and integrity are empty rhetoric, the real goal is to enhance shareholder value.

An Open Question:

[Vlad2.0]

Why do companies absolutely insist on keeping records of everything? (I make (temporary) exceptions for the following: backups, absolutely non-identifable data for site monitoring and traffic flow, and security logs).

If I ran an ISP/Service provider and a customer clicked the delete button I'd make sure that stuff was either erased immediately or very very soon (such as a cron job which expunges selected emails every half hour). I can understand logging something like, safe, people trying to telnet or SSH into a system of mine, but not every page view of my site. Why bother? Is it a legal requirement? Are they just trying to cover their collective asses? Sounds like a shitload of work for absolutely zero payoff (other than pissing your customers off...which really isn't a payoff at all.)

Re:Misinstructed by the example of Cuba

[KingJoshi]

Insightful? More like flamebait.

First, you said yourself that "the Cuban standard of living continues to slouch". Don't you think the embargo is partly to blame? Don't you think that possibly lifting that embargo would help those very same people? And doesn't that mean the plan is a failure?

I'm sure Google has many Chinese researchers. And I'm sure most Chinese people in China would prefer to have Google with censoring then no Google (as those are the only two options really). So you're condemning Google for offering a service in China which also explains that the results are censored (which most other search engines there don't do) when that action does no harm to you and benefits the Chinese, yet you want them to not offer the service which would have no affect upon you and not benefit the Chinese either. Really easy for you to decide no?

"Clears the Air"

[loconet]

So not only do they roll out a magnificent search engine, help research in Africa to clean water, help illiterate kids learn to read/write, fight poverty, etc .. but now they are also fighting pollution?!