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Google's CEO Clears the Air

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the there's-a-lot-of-fog-out-here dept.

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."

4 of 147 comments (clear)

  1. Similar article on the BBC by Paul+Townend · · Score: 5, Informative

    I suspect that this BBC article:

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

    was made based on the same meeting....

  2. I don't agree totally... by garcia · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

  3. Personal info as target by msbmsb · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".

  4. Privacy concerns by Baseball_Fan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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?