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Google's CEO Warns Kids Will Have to Change Names to Escape "Cyber Past"
Google's Eric Schmidt says that people's private lives are so well documented now that the young will have to change their names when reaching adulthood to avoid their youthful indiscretions. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal Schmidt says: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." A fresh start from the stupid things you did as a kid seems like a good thing. Now we just need a way to get rid of the dreaded family photo album.
... or we'll collectively learn that throwing rocks in the neighbour's window is NOT a life-tainting event that will destroy your life forever? Criminal records are, in theory, forever, and even killers get to move on when their sentences are done.
Flaming farts? Star Wars Kid?
It looks like they've not only turned away from "Do no evil," they've killed it and disposed of the body.
Fuck, we use the SSN like it's a throwaway identification nowadays. If it's compromised you might as well become a new person, it's easier than getting a new SSN reissued with your original name.
Or, you know, we could just become less prudish as a society. But that's crazy talk.
I am getting really tired of Google's lack of respect for privacy; not to mention their hypocrisy...telling everyone else how to do things while they walk out with the safe through the back door. What a joke!
I know I shouldn't have used my real name on Slashdot
Funny how that's coming from the guy who's indexing it all so we can find it easier.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
"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."
Surely he jests. I know Google hasn't always been the most steadfast guardian of personal privacy, but coming right out and stating that you want your company to become so intertwined with peoples' lives that it will plan their future for them? That's just creepy...
people will stop acting like trash because there will be more consequences and the world will be a better place to live in.
Also, get over yourself, google.
This kind of schlock comes from the same corporate minds that have been pushing for real names and credit card information to be associated with all online interactions. I'd like to go back to taking anonymous aliases for granted again please.
I have the same name as a Canadian hockey player, though unintentionally, and virtually every result for my name on Google is for him. If your name is common enough and you practice information control over yourself you can almost completely avoid being in Google's system. The real problem is that youths are willing to give out vast amounts of personal information, partially because they don't realize the value of such information and partially because they are stupid kids.
People will grow up and learn that stupidity has consequences. Then train their kids to live productive giving lives instead of wasting their youth on idleness and pointlessly looking for lines to color outside of just to prove they are different.
Instead of planning on changing your name when you grow up you can choose be responsible instead.
I'm not sure he thought this one through.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
Actually, there is that little box on a job application asking "have you ever been convicted of a crime?" I never paid it any mind because it's easy to say "no" when that's the truth, but some people have to make a calculation. Is it better to check the box and hope they still get a chance to explain in the interview, or leave it blank and hope it never comes up that they lied on the application?
So having a criminal record can, indeed have long-lasting effects. Remember, the question is usually "have you ever."
(As aside, a friend of mine had to answer "have you ever been arrested, which led to the amusing story of him and four other high school kids breaking into the gym because they got locked out during a late track practice... charges were dropped but technically that was an arrest.)
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
"the young will have to change their names when reaching adulthood to avoid their youthful indiscretions"
OK guys, I have to admit, girls are WAY ahead of us on this one.
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
I think this guy has a goal to sound like an utter tool at least once a week...
There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
I saw his comments earlier today, and it struck me that it won't make a bean of difference (in a social networking context) unless everyone changes their name. If you are still "connected" with a distinct (and essentially fingerprintable) social network of people then you are always identifiable - your old name can simply be correlated with your new one based on who all of your "friends" are and other indelible information (education, location, background, likes, dislikes, etc) - assuming you are not starting a new life in a new country and never speaking to anyone from your past ever again.
The only way it may be able to work is if everyone changed their names - and even then I think there would still be enough unchangeables to be able to positively correlate old and new identity information unless, again, you are starting a new life in a new country and have no connections to the past.
People who get heavily involved in social networks do not have a clue what the implications for them in the long term are - not even a smidgen of a clue. Facebook know you for life (because they know *you* - and all of *your* connections, not just a username connected to other usernames). Even when facebook fades away as the fad that it is and something else takes over as the hip trendy thing to do, facebook still know who you are, and can still use that to make money long after Zuckerberg has started shaving.
Uh, most employers ask for any previous names you might have had. You know, to catch people escaping their past. I think a few people have tried that before.
Of course, before facebook, the solution was to just use a pseudonym. Not that it's a real solid solution, more like a cheap masterlock.
Half of the names on facebook, etc are bs. Just look at "Candy Apple" or "King Kong Shlong" for examples. Almost every chick you meet these days gives their "public" name to you: "What's your name?" .... "Oh, I'm Keshia, what's yours?". Kids figured this out years ago, dude you're just catching on now??
If people would stop posting their idiotic behavior all over the web (Facebook, etc), this would be less of a problem.
Come to think of it, if they'd just stop being idiots in general the world would be a much better place.
I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time
Why, it becomes SOCIETY again. Way back before towns had 29 million people in them and mobility wasn't hyperamplified by oil and 99% of us interacted with the same few hundred folks every day of your life, people knew of the stupid shit you did when you were a kid and repeated it at your funeral.
But they also recognized that kids are ignorant, impulsive, incompetent beings, and they treated the adult differently and got on with the world.
I don't believe Mr. Schmidt understands what society is.
I know he doesn't understand what neutrality is.
I'm pretty sure he's lost the plot on evil, as well.
http://xkcd.com/327/
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
This is not a new discussion... there have been people thinking about this for some time. In March of 2006 I wrote an article on my blog about it (reproduced below) which eventually led to me consulting with Public Radio on a show they were doing at the time about online public information (you can listen to an archived copy of that at October 12, 2007: Your Exposed Life on MPR
My Original Article 3/24/2006:
I've often wondered who will be able to run for political office in forty or fifty years. People, especially youg people, seem to be so naive about posting things online. For years online forums and message boards have been a place where people vented. Now sites like Myspace, Facebook and others are creating such a low barrier to entry that almost every middle and high school child in the United States has some kind of web presence. What many fail to understand is that once something is posted or "said" on the internet it never goes away...ever. The internet is also quite easy to search if you know what you're doing. This dangerous combination means that everything you write to a message board can be found at some point in the future and "can and will be used against you". Any kind of off-color comment or joke you ever made online, even if your intention wasn't to hurt anyone, is public knowledge.
Employers already know about this. BusinessWeek recently ran an article called "You are what you post" that talked about some of the implications for job seeking but I think the arena where this will really get the consultants salivating is politics. There are so few people who are able to hold their tongue and never offend anyone. In the past politicians have relied primarily on obscuring and making it difficult to find embarrassing things about their past. When today's teens start running for political office these things will only be an internet search away. Remember that posting to that email discussion list about STDs you made when you were 15? How about that time someone on a message board got you mad and you called them a racial slur? You may have forgotten these incidents but the internet has not and neither will your enemies.
I wonder if the politicians of the future will need to be groomed from birth to have no defects and think very, very carefully before ever speaking. On the other hand our society may end up becoming more accepting of faults which would not be an all bad outcome. This remains to be seen but in the meantime those of us who have always tried to think about how what we say today could come back (for better or worse) in the future are going to be much better off than the indiscriminate masses.
I'm certain that legal changes-of-name aren't public records, unlike virtually everything else the courts do(the interface might suck ass, it might even involve tromping down to the courthouse or some document depository somewhere; but that is what you pay LexisNexis for...)
The idea that the system is going to be so omnipresent and good at remembering that you would like to escape your past is highly probable, whether or not google aids and abets. The idea that such a system could be fooled by anything short of a cool few million in back alley sci-fi medicine, some seriously impressive document doctoring skills, and probably changing every habit, friend, and familiar location you've ever had is silly.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Won't Google just enhance their search to give results for the name you are googling along with results for everyone who changed their name to the one you are Googling? Doesn't seem like this will separate you from your past. Best bet is to choose a common name like Tom Brown, Jim Wong, Stephen Smith, etc.
I'm gonna start cyber-squatting on the best names...
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
How about this instead. How about our generation finally admit to ourselves that we are all human and aren't "good little christians". Every single one of us will have to learn to not care otherwise there will be no one left to lead.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Okay, not an entirely easy fix, but what's to stop a society from creating laws preventing the collection or dissemination of this type of information?
The part I really don't understand is why Schmidt runs around and spouts crap that comes off as fear-mongering when this is the type of stuff on which Google is basing the company's future. If anything, he should be reassuring people that this kind of scenario will never come to pass because Google is more responsible than this and values the privacy of its users.
I change names and email accounts all the time... it is how the internet works.
--- ac
I think in the West we had a strange unnatural period where for the first time in human history there was enough individuality and wealth across the general populace that we could actually keep our lives private. This is not a luxury that most peoples and cultures of the world either have now or have ever really had. The only difference now is that instead of being recorded in the memories of all our the members of our community and anyone they happen to talk about it with, it is recorded electronically.
sudo mount --milk --sugar
...the rest of the internet will still find you.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I share a name with a famous athlete. I am a needle in a haystack as far as my real name in a google search.
In an effort to scatter my online activity I've recently put to rest the notion of having just one nick. Now I have many. Every new site or forum I join that allows anonymity I use a different nickname. I'm not fond of many of the new screen names I use, but I can walk away from my user profiles without caring.
I don't participate in myspace, facebook, or any site that encourages putting my personal info up there.
My wife on the other hand, does not share my feelings on the matter. As a result someone I know found my very private (for emergencies) cell number recently and decided to be nasty to me for not giving them the number.
I never had problems like that back in my BBS days.
Thousands of years ago, we'd be hard-pressed to move outside our tribe and start a new life for ourselves. Then technology and large populations come along and we're able to "start over" basically anywhere we like. Now we're back again to our tribe, albeit of 7 billion, where everyone can know our past again. Interesting.
people will come to realize that a lot of shit is not actually as important as the old generations thought, and just let them go ? and noone will need to hide their own true self ?
...
it aint stepford wives district anymore
But on the whole, I wouldn't hire the guy who somehow thinks throwing in your neighbors windows is "acceptable" no matter your age.
Gosh, I expected an example like a kid caught skipping school, or listening to some really bad music or being drunk. Not serious crime.
Oh, I set an orphanage on fire at 16, but that is just kids being kids.
Somewhere there is a level between stuff you shouldn't have done but you grew out of it AND serious warning signs that this person has trouble separating right from wrong. And the OP crossed.
What he wants is the "no consequences" society. Where nothing is ever your fault and you should never be made to face the consequences of your actions. The kind of world Amnesty International wants were not a single criminal would ever do time because it is just to hard on them.
Sorry, but the majority says NO.
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. And the time is the rest of your fucking life. On behalf of everyone who did NOT throw in their neighbors windows. GET STUFFED.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The records for name change petitions are filed and can be viewed by the public unless a court seals it. IANAL.
Why in the world would this man's age be relevant at all? Is this some less-than-subtle form of the 'old ppl sux @ teh inernt' stereotype?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
I'm not a narcissist, so I don't use Facebook or Twitter. Therefore this does not affect me.
>I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available
Actually, you have the perfect example in a small town, where everybody knows your name, who you are, where you live, what you have done...etc. The only exception is that they have no choice but to move away to a new town as far away from their own town to avoid anyone knowing what happened. Changing your name is not possible, unless you are made of money..so I think the first Google generation wont be able to get by, but all generations after that should be brought up with the thought that anything you do or say can be captured and posted online, so think twice before you tarnish someone's name or start sending out pics of your butt to your friends.
Parents need to be more proactive especially today, in their kids lives, whether real or virtual, to avoid cyber bullying, to avoid
sexual predators, and also to avoid all the junk that comes from being young and stupid. Our lives no longer remain real, they are virtual as well, so now the parents must be even more implicated!
You could just change your nick or post anonymously.
I agree big time. I really wish ticalc.org would purge their comments from 12 years ago.
While Google may be the dominant information indexer, what they're doing doesn't require any special magic.
Someone needs to tell that to Bing and Yahoo... ...just saying, if there wasn't secret sauce, there wouldn't be a dominant player.
-- Terry
Sure, you think that, right now when you have zero responsibility. But wait till it is your own company and you got to choose between hiring the person with an alcohol problem and the one that goes to bed early enough to be awake at work.
Gosh, which do you choose? And I don't care what nonsense you spout now. When it is your own money you put in a company, you will be whistling a different tune.
Mind you, most employers who have something to loose have a simpler remedy for it. Don't hire young people. Really, I have been worried about finding jobs as programmer as I got older, but in fact it has been gotten easier. When asked almost all employers answer that age is in fact a benefit to them. They know you don't think some rock concert is more important then your job. You can still take days off for events, but they know you will not drink yourself in to a stupor the last evening so you can actually show up fresh for work when your employer is paying for your hours ago.
Archive your post, and read it again in 20 years, when you have moved up from the fryer to head fryer and say what you think then.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
What scares me just as much is if not having your life exposed on the internet works against you: "We googled you and couldn't find anything. What are you hiding?" To some extent this already happens if you leave the U.S. for prolonged periods of time (years). When you return, you may find some things difficult to do because you become a suspicious person without verifiable previous addresses, employment histories, etc.
Sounds like Clarke and Baxter's "Light of Other Days". Societal impacts in the book were huge.
The reminded me:
"Kids, this-piece-of-paper's-got-47-words-37-sentences-58-words-we-wanna-
know-details-of-the-crime-time-of-the-crime-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-
you-gotta-say-pertaining-to-and-about-the-crime-I-want-to-know-arresting-
officer's-name-and-any-other-kind-of-thing-you-gotta-say", and talked for
forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had
fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there,
and I filled out the massacre with the four part harmony, and wrote it
down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the
pencil, and I turned over the piece of paper, and there, there on the
other side, in the middle of the other side, away from everything else on
the other side, in parentheses, capital letters, quotated, read the
following words:
("KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?")
I went over to the sargent, said, "Sargeant, you got a lot a damn gall to
ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm
sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench
'cause you want to know if I'm moral enough join the army, burn women,
kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug." He looked at me and
said, "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send you fingerprints
off to Washington."
No, I'm Spartacus.
Register a fake name with Facebook etc... as that is what we are really talking about here.
I already have friends on Facebook that are registered under an assumed name. It can be a bit confusing at first, but its just like having an online handle in the old days.
It's not like Facebook can actually check or anything. The only problem is that if everyone does this, then no one can find one another, which totally negates any reason for using Facebook. If a few do it, no one can find you, but you just add everyone else that you know.
Anyway I guess if you really think this stuff through, then it is in Facebooks very best interest to straighten up and start enforcing some strict privacy protocals, because as soon as everyone starts using aliases, Facebooks entire business plan falls to pieces.
Or you could show some common sense and not post anything you remotely care about on sites like Facebook, and if your friends do, then unfriend them.
When I interview these recent grads and see nothing out there, I wonder, did they have NO life or did they manage to erase their past?
If I see that the kid went to some parties and got sh*t-faced, so what, many of us did that. But, if I find nothing, my imagination is left to fill in the blanks.
Gosh, first reaction so far that puts the shoe on the other foot. Uptil this post everyone complains basically that their criminal record can come back to haunt them. Oh noes! Being held accountable for your actions! What will the world turn into.
Don't think that your dream will happen AC. Notice you yourself don't even dare to post it under your own account and face the karma burn.
People learning to accept the consequences of their actions and therefor restrain themselves from actions that might hurt them? Nah.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I have a very uncommon name, and when I was all of 11 years old, I posted a version of a dirty limerick to a comedy website back in the mid nineties. I still have no idea why I used my full name. Nevertheless, when you google me, most of the results are reposts of this limerick on newer websites.
So, for the rest of recorded history, I may be known for the equivalent of potty humor that a few years earlier would have simply disappeared into memory. I can only imagine how it must be for someone who had more serious lapses of judgement before they really had judgement.
My maxim is that you shouldn't post anything online if you don't want it seen by your mom, your boss (current and future), and a sex offender. Why? Because all three of those people have access. No I don't care if you set it to "private" that's no security. You post something online, the world can see it, just assume that is the case.
Now that doesn't mean don't post ANYTHING online, just make sure that you only post stuff you are ok with the world knowing. This is particularly true when done under your own name, like on facebook.
The benevolence of the family photo album, even with its monster bells and orange juice can curlers is that it isn't being whored by Eric "Pandar" Schmidt. The hypocrisy that he bemoans that in which he played a major part is typical of the twenty first century; A Low Dishonest Decade-2.0.
Some people touched on it already but this vaguely correlates to an article that Wired did where the author tried to start a new life. He invited basically anyone who read the article leading up to the experiment to try to find him within a certain amount of days (there may have been a cash prize, I don't recall). Anyways, he found emotionally starting a new life is as hard or harder than physically creating a new persona. The guy ended up getting caught because he was a little sloppy but it showed just how it's nearly impossible to get away from your old life.
If you wanted to get away from legal but dumb mistakes, a name change wouldn't help you what so ever unless you completely started over and never made any connections to your past (a la witness protection).
My how the worm turns! Instead of 'do no harm' Googles real mantra appears to be 'blame yourself for using our services'. Its good and proper to raise awareness to what extent data retention may affect you, but it is another to not allow access to what is otherwise considered personal data. Google loves to collect it, but heaven help you should you need to remove it. We have lots of sneaky ways to obtain data about people with no one stepping up to the plate and saying 'Here's your profile, change it at any time' Instead, we are only given ways to save it and with effort, retrieve it. You would think one should likewise be able to alter it. After all, even Google knows you can change your name. So why not your data?
Just change your name to...Eric Schmidt! If enough of you cool kids do it, your multitude indiscretions will never reach the first five pages on Google. Those pages are reserved for the "real" Eric Schmidt to discuss new, nefarious ways for his company to invade your privacy. That's some nice "inverse SEO juice" right there.
Or better still, stop posting all manner of personal information about yourself online. Delete your accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. Social networking sites are powered by the information people willingly supply, so stop supplying it.
Email worked for me in the early 1990s and it still works for me today. Thank you, Phil Zimmermann, for giving us the precious gift of PGP!
How about we REQUIRE you guys to ACTUALLY DELETE THINGS when we ask you to? Oh no...couldn't put any of the burden on you guys could we Eric?
David Brin beat you by a decade
Here's his 1996 wired column, which he later expanded into a book:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/fftransparent.html
Here's the Wikipedia page on his book "The Transparent Society", which was published in 1998.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society
-- Terry
Why the hell do you have to say something nightmarish every day of the week? Does this crap turn investors on?
At this point I'm fully expecting him to tell an interviewer that: "Revealing political affiliation to others may result in being beaten to death by opposing operatives. I don't think society realizes the dangers in open displays of fraternity. Fortunately, based on your searches, Gmail, YouTube viewing habits, location and Facebook/Twitter posts, we can tell you what candidate to vote for. We think you want it this way. BTW, you are voting or at least we suggest that you vote for Vampire Bill and his running mate, 'Your rich uncle gave you a lightning ball of self-confidence!'."
I just legally changed my name to Tubgirl Goatse.
The most important thing to do in your life is to not interfere with somebody else's life. -FZ
People are freaked out about this but they have not factored in that future world is one where the same is true of EVERYONE. When everyone has stuff going way back into childhood online, people will also be a lot more accepting of weird past stuff coming up on people.
Don't forget that it also serves as a record of all the GOOD you have done as well, when kids reach college age they may tend to perhaps volunteer more or do other helpful things recorded online to help them later. There is no system you cannot game for your benefit.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Well that's one way to look at it. But if every youth has these past documented indiscretions than it's going to be hard for employers to find employees without them, and thus there will be no value to even checking for them. Society changes. It always has.
If Net Neutrality is not preserved then it won't matter. The internet will be fragmented and so will the information on it.
I mean, I've heard about some kids that post *EVERYTHING* online, but all of my kids realize that nothing on the internet is ever private, and virtually all of their peers, to the best of my understanding, seem to realize this as well, and they don't post stuff online they don't want people knowing about.
I can't help but think that this problem is as big as the article makes it out to be.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
As a human I haven't managed to examine all of my beliefs- or when they manage to be contradictory. Though I do try to resolve some of the spots that seem funky. After you've resolved the conflicts, some of the rational gets pitched, and you have some beliefs that you don't have a quick reason for why you believe something. Why a rubiks cube cant be scrambled to a state that is harder to solve than 20 moves. Or why in tic tac toe why when (X center: move 1) O side is always a losing move vs a logical opponent.
Even with a well though out set of beliefs, a person can take multiple quotes and show that you have contradictions. If you cant be caught in a contradiction, either A: your not saying much, B: have a really simple view of the world, or C: have a really simple belief system.
Society that agrees on most issues is bad. People should have different points of view and values. Logging can destroy forests, and animal habitat. Not Logging can destroy jobs, and impact the price of lumber, and in some cases lead to fires. Neither of these sides should be able to run rampant, the conflict itself often leads to solutions that are less harmful than a simple compromise would be (ok there are plenty of counter-examples). So this is a point of view that I hold -- that conflict helps -- that I cant back up, and I often slam conflicts as being stupid.
And this is why I can never be a politician.
Storm
we rode skateboards, smoked pot, and got tattooed – and it was bad. Now there are skate parks in every town, tattoos are cliche, and California is about to legalize it. Seriously, no one is going to care about that facebook picture of you passed out in vomit when you were 16. Unless that's the tone you have set for your life. In that case, we don't need the internet to suss you out. My experience is that people regularly put their characters on display. No internet needed. I'm sick of breathless predictions about how some new technology is going to screw everyone up. If anything, we are going to care less about youthful indiscretion when everybody's is filed and cataloged.
46 & 2
Rather than millions of people changing names to please society, society will change because those millions of people *are* the next society.
Infuriate left and right
Nobody cares now about things that happened a few years ago unless it was seriously psychotic. Most of the people I know are quite happy to tell everything about the mischeavious stuff they did while still at school. They're actually quite proud of it and their current employers are probably aware of it.
"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."
But Google, I don't WANNA. No Google, don't get mad! AHHHHHH!
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
I'll just name my kid Anonymous Coward. Then at least whatever they do on Slashdot won't come back to haunt them...
The original concept of Satan was "Ha Satan" -- the Accusing Angel...
Google's Motto is "Don't Be Evil" (now we discover -- Or Else!)
Google's CEO says "You can run but you can't hide... we will accuse you" (Maybe they are planning to start selling new names?)
Google's Net Neutrality stance is "Don't be neutral... all your sites are belong to us"
Therefore Google = HaSatan;
And I, for One, welcome our new Satanic Overlord...
On one side, most of the WSJ readers are not IT-aware. They imagine Google viewers to be able to find references to them on numerous web sites while googling. That is true. But the potential Google privacy interference goes beyond that: Google could perform some data crossing from IP addresses, cookies, web pages, images and exif, map locations, mail, chat, videos, documents, network traffic, sites affluence, news... Google holds underestimated power over people they could use if they want. And so far they didn't show us that ability.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that we will have to deal with privacy - our own and others privacy - differently in the coming future. But are we ready to access that level of privacy, "Google like"? I'm not sure. Not now.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
I wonder if a name change will be enough. Face recognition is quite good today, and I guess it's only a question of time before we can (or someone can) search for people by only having a photo of them. Maybe google will have a button like "search for more photos of this person" :)
I am tired of self-contradictory articles.
We record data so well that you won't be able to escape it, so change your name.
But your old name was data, and your new name was data... so we'll record the change somewhere too, and poof you're back to not being able to escape your previously published past. Sorry, try again, thanks for playing.
I don't see an answer besides education. Teach kids early, with real case studies and illustrative examples, that nothing can be reliably deleted anymore and even if you don't care today you might care in a decade.
the point that it is NOT just what YOU post, BUT rather what OTHERS post and share about you, often without permission.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
>are so well documented now that the young will have to change
>their names when reaching adulthood to avoid their youthful indiscretions.
Kind of an ironic statement coming from the guy looking for a way to catalog and cross reference that name-change.
Hardly any employers are really taking minor youthful indiscretions seriously. The ones that are are losing out competitively to the ones that don't, because they aren't hiring the best people. Unless you've done something quite surprising, you are going to be fine:
Talented, but drunk in college? Hired.
Talented, but dressed up stupidly in college? Hired.
Talented, but had sex in college? Hired.
Talented, but made a fool of yourself in college? Hired.
Talented, but murdered someone in college? Maybe not.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Good luck escaping the web.
You can't escape your past for similar reasons in a small town either, but at least you can move away...
There will be enough links that you'll still be traceable back to your old identity... facial recognition, social security number, address history, and so on.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
I started doing that a bit late, but I've been doing it for awhile now too. It's nice to have a different "me" in different communities. I've even going so far as to have more than one identity in a few places, as I'm a member of more than one group that I don't want to combine. The wall is necessary when both know different other identities of me. It's a crazy web, for sure.
But by and large, it's working for me. I do have a very limited facebook profile, mainly because I went back to school a decade after I got out the first time, and all the kids here use it as their primary means of communication. It's either be there, or be a social outcast. However, it doesn't have my birthday, any previous employers, previous schools, likes or dislikes, or family connections. Just a brief bit of who I am now, and a list of people I need to keep an eye on for social announcements.
Keeping your identity from gathering mud online is hard work. I think that's part of why we're seeing so little of it as time goes on. Kids don't have that sort of patience or forethought, most of the time.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
Mod me troll, but this is so nasty and insolently statement, that i am simply out of words...... Sooo Google, are you trying to say that you REALLY track, keep, sort, and manage all the details of my online activities?????
With the advances in face recognition changing your name will not do. And there are lots of other clues to link your new id to your old one, like the position in your social network. It would only work if you quit the internet entirely after getting your new id.
Dear Former Sir,
This letter is to inform your membership is being revoked forthwith and that you are required to immediately turn in your man card for this egregious violation of the man code of conduct.
If you wish to appeal this decision, you may submit your petition to the board for review along with no less that ten letters of recommendation from members in good standing.
Sincerely,
The Society of Men
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
The Dinosaurs died because you touch yourself
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I share a name with a famous athlete. I am a needle in a haystack as far as my real name in a google search.
That's nice. Google has one cpu core for every straw... in every haystack in all the fields in the tri-state area. I think they'll find your needle eventually. Of course, their current search interface doesn't allow the public to find info on you easily, but they may have an interface soon that does something like: "give me height/weight for $FamousAthleteName, but not the famous athlete. I think he lived in $City once".
Record this: Fuck you Eric Schmidt.
http://valleywag.gawker.com/5497193/exclusive-how-googles-eric-schmidt-lost-his-mistress-his-partner-and-steve-jobs No wonder.
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
Was that his assertion that people don't want Google to help them find information, people want Google to tell them what to do.
Maybe I'm just being naive, but I kind of hope that as our indiscretions become more and more public, we'll stop pointing fingers at each other for their indiscretions. Glass houses, and all that.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
I one voted for Lyndon Johnson. (posted anonymously for obvious reasons)
Sulphur, I've got some good news and some bad news for you...
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Well, maybe.
I might prefer to be known for my own blunders than his.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Always make sure there are no cameras in the room before you take a bong hit
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
CEO speak uncomfortable truth.
But when is Eric going to stop giving his enemies an inexhaustable supply of bullets?
Spend a few dollars of your billions on a PR dept already, FFS.
I'm all for being accountable for your actions, but there's a limit. Do you seriously think people will stop drinking and partying? People want to have fun without always thinking about how it'd look like on a resume. People will do dumb things. Should they drag you down? No. If you were to apply this stance to all the population, I think 80% of them wouldn't have a job right now because they had one party that went a bit far or they did something "inappropriate" at some point in their life. Blowing some firecrackers or getting framed for something you haven't done should definitely not fuck you for life.
Not the whole "changing your name" part.
No, the part about what you say online staying online for all to see, forever. OK, so we can all be more connected to eachother? Huzzah! I'm more suspicious of the person whom I know little about or has a "clean slate" than a person who is open with who they were and what they've done in the past if they can also show that they've changed or if it's obvious that they were young/drunk/joking/acting a "fool." That shows that they're human, for one, and hopefully that reflects the same thing back on me. People are going to be dumb, silly, funny, horrible, weird people, and I like that much more than human husks wearing ties and suits, saying the right words and never letting anyone know of their past, their present, or their hopes for the future.
How about, "Talented, but broke in to the servers on campus (insert each of these variants: out of boredom, curiosity, anger, jealousy, to prove a point, just being an asshat) in college?"
I think everyone with talent has pushed the envelope with regards to the letter of the law for one reason or another. In fact, I've known few good programmers who won't admit that they did some stupid things in their youth as they learned more about computers.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
If you have a criminal record, then you already faced consequences.
But of course those consequences should be ongoing and continuous, right? There should never be a "forgive and forget or at least stop giving a shit" threshold, right? Even though the law and society has decided so.
The difference between the consequences that are proportionate to what actually transpired and what uptight assholes think they should be is the problem.
The enemies of Democracy are
Too bad Google will also document all name changes....
I'm the opposite, there are only 20-30 people on the planet with my surname and no one has my given name and surname but me.
I think there are 6-8 males in North American with my surname.
So let me get this straight:
- Google says "don't use user names to protect your privacy, use your real name as your user name"
- Google says "there are times when you need to throw away your user name to protect your privacy"
- Google says "yeah, that means you throw away your real name and invent a user name that you use as a real name going forward"
Wow that is fucking stupid.
All he's saying is "use your real name as a user name, and later, use your user name as your real name."
Did he think about the practical implications of this at all? If this were happening right now, over 50% of people aged 22 would be named either "Gaga" or "Jolie" or "Pitt."
Questions:
- is the Social Security administration and Internal Revenue Service and their equivalents in every country really going to throw away your old name?
- is your college going to issue your degree in the name of "Rock Beavereater" after you did all your classes as "Fred Jones?"
- are you going to throw away your friends, too, or is there going to be some way to inform your entire contact list that your name has changed from "Doris Grimley" to "Kristi Kardashian" without it being ridiculously easy to figure out that Kristi Kardashian is actually Doris Grimley for the rest of your life?
- are you going to get your parents and family to throw away their names, too? Or is it always going to be easy to figure out that "Rick Astley, Jr." used to be named "Howard Smith, Jr." since his father is named "Howard Smith?"
If you needed any more evidence that Google "doesn't get the social" then here it is.
You know, the Bible contains plenty of sex and rape too. Those parts of it don't get talked about much for some reason.
But, if I find nothing, my imagination is left to fill in the blanks.
Er... maybe you shouldn't be the one interviewing people, because those blanks are going to be filled in by every prejudice you don't even know you had.
It's like the example Carl Sagan gave on Cosmos.
Observation of Venus: We can't see a thing.
Conclusion about surface: Dinosaurs!
Since society is merely a collection of individuals, I believe what you meant was that some individuals will hold grudges against other individuals.
1. Kid posts stupid things on Internet.
2. Kid embarrassed, possibly unemployable
3. Kid changes name
4. New Google Paid service - Court records on Name Changes
5. Profit
I'm certain that legal changes-of-name aren't public records...
Depends on the jurisdiction. I changed my name a long time ago, and at the time you had to run a legal ad in the newspaper as part of your application. Since mine was of the form "I, boyname am applying to change my name to girlname...", it was fairly obvious what was going on. I got some weird phone calls, since boyname was in the phone book. Some of them were looking for advice on doing what I was in the midst of doing.
This was long before the Internet in its present form, so boyname doesn't come up in Google at all. Nor does girlname plus any of the search terms one might use, though girlname comes up related to other things I've messed with, as well as references to other women with the same name as me.
I forgot to preview. It should be once, not one. Thanks.
It seems unlikely that a simple name change would allow anyone to escape their digitized past in Schmidt's vision of the future. How many kids would be willing to ditch every possible link to their former life? How long before a search engine links up a birth name to the new persona? Schmidt also said, "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." If Google develops a fingerprint of a particular individual through his data, a person would have to change every habit, every association, if he hoped to leave his past behind. That or every search service in the world would have to voluntarily decouple childhood information from adulthood. I'd prefer a society that simply accepts that individuals act differently in varied contexts and act stupidly with consistency.
What people need to change is their accusatory nature, not their name. If someone can't let go of something I did when I was 17 years old now that I'm in my 30s then fuck them. I don't need them in my life anyway.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
If more people were like you the rePukes would be running the country.
I think he was talking about women changing last names after getting married... unless you don't follow that custom, or maybe married another man.
In the not so far future people will be digging up forum/twitter/blog posts that some presidential candidate made when they were 13. A future president could be decided on the fact that /b/ on 4chan was archived.
You'll have to recolor your skin and completely fuck up your face and bone structure as well, thanks to computer vision technology and gait recognition. Eric knows this, he's just trolling us. You can't escape it.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
What if there always has been a system that records everything? In the eastern religions there's a substance that permeates everything, sees everything and knows everything. It's called 'akasha'. Perhaps these kids are just familiar with things being recorded and it's us old fogies that think we're consequence-less just because we're able to keep things 'under wraps' when there really are consequences we're just not sufficiently aware of. What is karma? Why would there be reincarnation?
Neutiquam erro
"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."
The moment Google steps on this direction far enough for me to detect it, I'm off google.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
This from the @sshat who claimed that you don't need privacy if you're doing nothing wrong.
1. Not really. It just means it's going to favour those with a common/uncommon name (depending on whether it means the googler gets bored after twenty pages of other people called "John Smith" and nothing juicy, or if the first "John Smith" that pops up is a child rapist), or who are basically luckier.
Remember that even if everyone did do the same thing in the same amount, not everyone will be as prominently represented. You could be the college asshole and still slip through the cracks because nobody posted about it, or you could be the girl who gets rejected because someone took your photo while you were waiting for a taxi on a street corner and captioned it "Prostitution In New York." Or the guy who was just sleeping on the sofa at the party because you had already pulled an all nighter for an exam and were tired, and some asshole took a photo and captioned it "lol, John Doe drunk himself stupid".
Those people don't actually have a history of everyone's life, and the full context for everything. They're just taking a tiny random sample, and out of context at that, so basically it becomes more of a matter of luck. They'll still find someone who seems clean by sheer random luck and using a sieve with holes the size of a bus, basically, even if technically he didn't really pass their theoretical threshold.
And for most jobs there's actually such a surplus of potential candidates, that basically even randomly dropping 9 applications in 10 is ok. It just doesn't have to be something that stinks of discrimination, because you can get sued. But otherwise you can even use tarot or numerology, and some companies actually _do_. Yep, if the numeric values for the letters in your name don't sum up to the same digit as the company name, your application is dropped unread.
Replacing it with basically dropping 9 out of 10 based on googling them, isn't going to put them out of business. They just replaced one random test with another.
2. Actually, a lot won't as much have to do with setting any threshold as with covert discrimination. It's nigh impossible to prove that they googled harder for dirt on, say, the black female applicant than for the white guy, and "but we found she got drunk at a party 20 years ago! we don't want that kind of people in our school!" already sounds like a justified reason instead of plain old discrimination.
In other words, just because there is a threshold, it doesn't mean that it has to be the same for everyone. Setting a threshold which, if applied literally, means you'd find no employees, also can mean that you have just set a reason to reject everyone you don't like. You just have to be a little more lax with applying it those you do.
Remember: discrimination is already invariably rationalized as really just having an objective reason to hire X instead of Y. And for the most part people don't even think "I'll reject all the chicks because programming isn't for broads" or "I'm not hiring any black accountant 'cause niggers are dumb". Even the most overtly bigotted people I know, still like to delude themselves that they're really just objective and, say, they'd gladly hire anyone who fits their standards. They just end up somehow applying that standard stricter to some people than to others.
The same will basically be applied here. You just need to dig harder for some people than for others.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Name changes won't fill the bill at all. With computation reaching a certain point it should be fairly easy to find person A with the same characteristics as person B thus showing that they are one and the same person. Even without images and relying upon data alone it should be easy. For example all females graduating from public high schools in 1985 in Arizona would yield quite a few hits. But add in blue eyes and five feet six inches tall and the group gets smaller. Throw in a 3.7 grade point average and playing clarinet in the school band and you are probably down to a single person. The trick is in having a data base with enough trivia about people that points of comparison can be found. That is getting easier and easier every day.
That's why god made them.
Eventually you out grow 'pretty2u' and start using your real name.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So, the effect would be the same as i everyone would be using pseudonyms, just that we also loose the identity we may like? Should the schools be forced to reissue certificates etc? Should all offcial references be changed? or should the webpage of the alumi look like i never studied? Should i change my face (i have no doubt that searching for faces on picasa etc will arrive at some point in a big scale)? Should i tell wehn i apply for a job that this identity may be a little bit thinner than what you expect for my age?
No, thanks. I will just keep using pseudonyms and not let any photos of me besides official ones reside on the web. Who needs to know my real name will get to know it.
That's right, I said it. And I mean it. If you have so many felons in your society that their vote could sway an election then their voice should be heard. Not only that but we're trying to rehabilitate felons right? Getting them to participate in society in elections is a good thing.
If you don't want felons to vote then ask yourself, if felons could vote, what bad thing would happen?
You want to know what bad thing can happen when you keep felons from voting? You can have a political party take people out of the voting pool by making felons out of them.
If people are actually considering changing their name, which is traceable, why not, instead, for example, pull a Fight Club and get rid of the credit reporting agencies? That way, not only are all debt records erased, but no company will go collection on your arse because they don't want to have their data terminated!
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
If everyone is called John Smith from New York City, then they won't be able to find anyone. That's likely the best solution, because a cursory search won't come up with your name, or will find duplicate information, and they won't be able to tell one from the other.
Meanwhile, back at the /. Batcave, Google continues to crawl every single post, follow every posted link, cache each users profile pages, record date/time stamps, take note of ads blocked or clicked, correlate story usage across sites, cross-reference user posts across topics, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
What the fuck is up with Google? They do everything they CAN to collect data on us all, only to have this guy (their CEO, no less!) pop up and tell us it will ruin our lives? Do they think disclosure brings their actions in line with the mantra "Do no Evil"?
Am I the only one confused by this?
Seriously. He knocked up Mary and didn't even get consent.
Blar.
The pre-digital world was a world of semi-secrets.
There were lots of things that everybody close to you knew, but were effectively hidden to the rest of the world.
For example, you get drunk and pass out at a party, all the other partygoers know the secret, but your boss does not.
I wonder...
If everybody knew everything about everybody else, would it matter?
The boss might say, "yeah, everybody gets drunk and passes out at parties, there are plenty of photos of me in my college days out there..."
It might just become part of the background noise.
Now...armed robbery is another story entirely.
I've been online in one fashion or another since the university of buffalo gave computer services to my school in the late 60's. It was only MIT basic that we accessed with a teletype terminal, but we could chat to others once you got past the OS. Things weren't near as secure as they are today, thankfully. I've sloughed off more than a dozen online identities and maintain four or five at any one time.
I went through the whole computer revolution as an alias. Any kid lacking the sense to keep their online and real lives separate will get what they deserve. It's social Darwinism. I can track myself back for almost 30 years. But I know who I was then. This is the oldest alias I've ever had and this is about the last place I use it.
If you want to have a private life, the first thing to learn is to keep it private, not publish it for the world to see.
Narcissism kills your future...
"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."
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt
That is, without a doubt, the most ridiculous, and ALARMING, statement I have ever heard coming from Google. VERY disturbing.
Sad realism, or corporate arrogance?
You know I find it funny that his guy is saying this since isn't he also of the mindset that you can't have privacy on the internet? Kind of funny that one side of his mouth is talking about not needing to worry about net privacy while the other side of the mouth is painting the cautionary tale of how to cope with the net effect of this.
I pine for the old days /11 years on slashdot, and I've still never created an account // yes I know I'm basically lost in the background noise now days
To all those who tagged this article "dontdostupidstuff", for what definition of stupid are you talking about? Do you mean "stupid stuff" like shoot your mouth off online? Or how about the "stupid stuff" of being a member of a political party that is later rounded up and harrassed? How about being a member of *any* group (non-religious, sexual, intellectual, ethnic . . . ) that is later legislated to be "dangerous" or "stupid", or is just plain discriminated against?
The fact of the matter remains that until human society is tolerant enough to accept people for being innocuously different (where "innocuous" means "not harmful to others"), then privacy will still be necessary. In other words, privacy will be necessary for the foreseeable future. "dontdostupidstuff" indeed.
Nathan's blog
Because everybody will have youthful indiscretions online, so they just won't care about it. He's judging from a very 20th century POV. Yeah, everybody will know you were a dork in high school no matter what you do to try to hide it. But. So what? People change.
Take Star Wars kid for example: Sure, the guy went through a lot of pain then, but now he's doing fine and I'm sure he's got really resilient.
Gosh, first reaction so far that puts the shoe on the other foot. Uptil this post everyone complains basically that their criminal record can come back to haunt them. Oh noes! Being held accountable for your actions! What will the world turn into.
Don't think that your dream will happen AC. Notice you yourself don't even dare to post it under your own account and face the karma burn.
People learning to accept the consequences of their actions and therefor restrain themselves from actions that might hurt them? Nah.
All fine and dandy for someone who lives in a country where there are no victimless crimes, oh wait, that's nowhere. In the UAE you can be sent to prison for kissing in public, in Britain police officers can make up arbitrary laws on the spot under the provisions of the ASBO. In France it's illegal to wear certain headgear. In many countries a police officer can perform a warrant-free search on your person, if they simply suspect you of another well-known victimless crime. Sex with a minor even when you're the same age is a crime in many countries. Under-age possession of alcohol. The list goes on, most laws are fucked, and youths know that even better than us, they break laws, and sometimes they even make mistakes.
Criminals should have rights, and only those rights which will help prevent them from re-offending should be taken away.
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind" - ghandi
and then he can't be evil to us any more, because he won't be able to log in.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Any joker can tag a picture with anybody's name, and it doesn't matter if really is you or not.
Schmidt is *wrong*.
There will always be unforgiving, vindictive, dishonest, and just plain cruel people. And some of them will hold hiring authority.
But, if you don't want to work with those kinds of people, you don't have to worry about being honest with your past. Why does anyone want to work for a company that:
I've worked in this kind of environment and I don't miss it at all. You shouldn't give up your freedom because other people are jerks. If an employer won't hire you because you committed a few youthful indiscretions, you can bet they won't treat you like a person, either.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Schmidt is fast becoming the villain of the internet.
I just finished up changing my name last week in court. My estranged family have a stalking problem, which combined with the fact that I can't erase who I am on the internet created a situation where it was impossible to get away from an emotionally abusive situation. It was just far easier to just change my name so that they could not accidentally google me up.
It wasn't that I was leaving my name on the internet, but my school had an instructor that used a forum that was required for a class, with our real names. An employer had some photos online with employee names. As head nurse, I was named. I had acquaintances that called me by name on things like Livejournal.
It was just far easier to change my name to something they don't know. That way even if other things in my life use my name, a casual google search won't show anything useful. Luckily for me, my stalkers only know how to use "the google" and not anything more useful. It's the perfect time, too. I changed schools recently, moved to another state, and have so few ties to the old town I lived in, that I feel reasonably safe now. The internet just doesn't forget, so it's easier to just change your name.
How about being a member of *any* group (non-religious, sexual, intellectual, ethnic . . . ) that is later legislated to be "dangerous" or "stupid", or is just plain discriminated against?
You mean like over-40 job applicants at Google?
That's the name everybody should change to once they reach adulthood. (even women).
Problem resolved.
Some earlier posters pointed out, that you shouldn't be afraid of your online info if you behave responsibly and don't commit any evil. I could agree to this but the problem is, that there exists many activities which i consider perfectly fine moraly and ethicaly but which are considered unlawfull by the goverment and juridical system. The first examples which come to mind of such activities are illegal drug use and distribution (see this Milton Friedman video for reasons why i consider it OK) and illegal use of copyrighted material which can't be obtained from legal sources (Author is lost, distribution has ended or the distibutors won't release it because they fear the losses from piracy would be greater then income from sales and the release won't be worth it). So yes, i wouldn't mind posting all my activities online but first we must fix our legal system so it don't criminalise perfectly fine behavior.
People who do stupid stuff when they are young grow up and do stupid stuff when they are old.
I will not sacrifice my livelihood in the futile effort to preserve my privacy. If others want to be small-minded enough to be bigoted against me, that's their problem. I don't worry about perception. If I did, I'd live a sad, hermit-like life, and hide under a silly Star Wars pun alias...oh wait...
“Every day there’s people shooting each other. You know what I do when I see that? I look to see what guns they’re using and I think to myself, why not my guns?”
(The first and most important rule of gun-running is: Never get shot with your own merchandise.)
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Spoiling your seed is bad for the prostate. Spilling your seed freshens the troops. Even mother nature knows this. I read a study long ago that men spontaneously freshen the troops prior to a sexual encounter after a period of separation. You can DIY or you can run yourself down to the dry cleaners and have your troops freshened by a professional in you don't mind the lack of liability insurance. DIY is quick and easy, can be practiced within the comfort of your own home, and you rarely catch anything you didn't already have.
Personally, I think society needs to relax it's fetish for spotlessness. A spotless human is an AC meat puppet. Bully pulpit now recruiting.