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.

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

[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?

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...

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.

"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?!