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Google CEO Schmidt Predicts End of Online Anonymity
Andorin writes "A tweet from the EFF pointed me to a short article detailing part of Eric Schmidt's speech to the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe on August 4. According to Schmidt, true transparency and anonymity on the Internet will become a thing of the past because of the need to combat criminal and 'anti-social' behavior. 'Governments will demand it,' he says, referring to full accountability and a 'name service for people,' possibly hinting towards mandatory Internet passports. The CEO of Google also made a couple of somewhat creepy references to the availability of information: 'If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go ... show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!'"
I've been avoiding photos for as long as I can remember. It's unlikely that there were more than a dozen taken (analog and digital combined) over the past 20 years...
I therefore doubt there are [that m]any available on the Net.
I have been very very careful about my identity on the internet. My user name is a random collection of letters and gives no hint of the hostels and room numbers I had in my college years.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Thank God I stopped at 13 pictures!
I'm going to send Eric Schmidt 14 pictures of my ass.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
Are there FBI agents trolling through this discussion waiting to pounce on the GNAA?
This is slashdot. They'd need a steamroller.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Yes, but you really should have stopped before that picture with the goat.
This is America, we don't stand for no frilly French accents in our words, only "Freedom Letters".
There is almost nobody with my name....but amusingly enough there is someone from almost the same town with the same name.....google away, I am not that guy. Wish I had his money...
It might seem funny now, but wait until thugs beat you up and piss on your rug. That rug really ties the room together.
Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
Yeah, me too! Well, except for Maps. And Scholar and shopping. Oh, and sometimes I use Groups. Any YouTube of course; everyone uses YouTube though so that doesn't count..
I deliberately used the Goates image for my profile. Anyone searching for it deserves to be horribly scarred for the rest of their life as I don't use facebook
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I won't take any bets on anyone finding you with "just" your name. That depends on who is looking, how many resources they can spend on the matter, and how dedicated they are.
But, the thing is, they don't HAVE to just go with your name. You know someone on Facebook - Mama, sister, brother, the geek in the marching band - SOMEONE. Most likely, you know half a dozen people or more. When one of them posted your photo(s) some of the other saw them, and commented. The IP address of each commenter is available, as well as that of the poster. If Uncle Sam, or a hacker, wants to find you, all the data needed is either available online, or avaialable by means of an interview with each of the people who publicly acknowledged that they know you.
Even without interviews, the feds could come to the hometown of all these people who know you, and just keep their eyes and ears open.
Hell, we have the basis on which to build another epic tale of adventure, as our young hero fruitlessly attempts to elude BIG BROTHER!! All we need to decide, is whether we'll have Elves, Dragons, Aliens, or Angels in the story. Crap - let's have them ALL!!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br