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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.
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...
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.
Except that in this case they aren't actually, you know, DOing anything. Evil or otherwise. He's talking about a problem that the internet as a whole creates and would be equally rampant with or without Google which Google has practically no effect on.
It's not an article about Schmidt releasing some new antiprivacy system, it's just a point he's making that the internet makes your past easily accessible to everyone forever. Hell, it's more Facebook than Google who's responsible. But no. Feel free to shoot the messenger.
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.
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.
All these stories that you hear about Google, and especially Schmidt, aren't anti-privacy stories. In fact, I would argue that they're more along the lines of honest warnings. Most of what he says echos what is common sense the the nerd community:
"If you don't want people to know about something, don't post it online." How many times have we said nearly this exact same thing to our friends and family? I know I have, especially to my younger, less experienced relatives.
"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." He's right, society doesn't understand and until people learn to look past minor indiscretions society never will. Until that time, the only way to have a fresh start is to give people a name that doesn't have all the past associated with it. He's not saying, "We're going to post all your data and theirs nothing you can do about it!", he's saying "the data is out there and we need to find ways to deal with it on a personal and on a societal level".
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 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
We're moving to a point where things you don't want people to know are showing up online without any action taken on your part. Someone snaps a photo of you, someone else tags it, some 3rd party web application aggregates it. The only action on your part was doing something stick up their ass society doesn't approve of. I think Schmidt is wrong. I think it's business that needs to change... or fail as our 20 year old somethings adapt and make their own businesses to replace them. I think the politics will be particularly entertaining 40 years from now.
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."
Maybe you should A) Have a talk with your friends about not posting and tagging pictures of you, they're the ones making the data publicly available, not Google. B) Periodically go into facebook and remove tags from pictures you don't want tagged (so it at least doesn't get indexed under your name). If it's something really bad send a message to your friend and have them remove it or make it private.
You can't blame Google for looking at publicly available information. What do you really propose Google does? Offer to let you censor your name? What about other people who share your name and don't want it censored (for example there is a doctor in NC that would be pretty pissed if I asked Google to block my name since it would be costing him patients). Or should Google just not index certain sites? It would take all of about a day for 5 competitors to jump all over that and provide the service that Google is denying. Even if you got all the major search engines to cooperate that doesn't change the fact that you can do the same searches on the individual sites. Nor does it change the fact that a couple of college students could start up a search engine that provides the service.
Google just tells the geeks what they've been telling to everyone else for ages: "information wants to be free". Guess what, it still does even if it's information that you don't want to be free. It's not a threat on Google's behalf, just a plain statement of fact. Today's erosion of privacy is not ultimately enabled by Google and Facebook, but by Internet as such.
I'm all for personal responsibility, but you have to make some choices when you're growing up, these choices all happen to you when your decision making faculties are still developing.
I don't mean the particles of experience (mistakes) that lead to better judgement later, I mean the scaffolding of the mechanism is still being developed. Teenagers and Twenty Somethings make bad descisions because the decision making part of the brain is still being finished.
I can't count the number of things that happened before I was 20 that should have killed me, I do know my insurance company dropped me before I was 18 because 1 person can only wreck so many cars.
I was wondering a while back if we couldn't have facebook for teens, then twenty somethings, then grown ups. When you graduate from one to the other, you old comments are sealed like court records. It hit me when I was riding with a cowowrker who was tellimg me the awful stuff her daughter posted on FB.
Kids are going to do stupid crap, there's got to be a statute of limitations for your childhood. Even background investigations and bankruptcies only go back 10 years.
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?
I am too busy living my life to spend any time whoring it out on social sites to thousands of people I don't even know. But I suppose having a sense of privacy makes me some kind of sociopath with skeletons in the closet. I don't understand the need some people have to tell everybody every thing they do. Do you also have sex with every person who happens to come within 10 feet of you? Why the hell are people so promiscuous with their "friendship?"
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!
if I find nothing, my imagination is left to fill in the blanks
If only your imagination was good enough to conceive that many names are so common that thousands of others share it, and many people have more of a life than "creating an internet presence". I don't know how long you've been out of school, but the inability to find someone on the internet doesn't mean jack shit. You really sound like an idiot, to be frank.
If you google my name, you don't find me. If you add in the last two places I worked, you STILL don't find me, even though I was listed on both places websites for a long time. If you add in my undergraduate college, you find a current bio on me at the place I work now. But that's it. That's the bulk of my online presence you can find using google, browsing Facebook, etc.
Why you'd assume that lack of internet presence is any indication of anything is beyond me. I've got a pretty damn active social life, am very active online, and I've got a pretty long career behind me. All of this I'll tell you when you interview me, and give you contacts to check into these things.
But a random search? Doesn't find much of anything. If you base hiring decisions on that lack of information, you're an idiot.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
So when you were younger you never:
Made fun of or teased anyone in a way which now as an adult you would regret?
Held views that you now would be embarrassed by?
Were an ardent fan of music or specific bands that might have promoted views of lifestyles you no longer want to be associated with?
Enjoyed songs or lyrics that may have others think you are depressed, angry, or prone to violent behavior?
Drank alcohol before you were of legal age, or attended parties that might give the appearance that you were drinking before legal age?
Experimented with drugs, or you associated with people or groups that may give the appearance that you experimented with drugs?
Said anything that could be misunderstood for you saying that you partook in illegal activities including drug use.
Spoke in a style (IE LOL, or 1337 speak) that you would be embarrassed by as an adult, or maybe you are not personally embarrassed by on a personal level, but on a professional level you don't want others to see?
It's not about being responsible. Schmidt is just pointing out that now everyone has to essentially conduct their lives as if they are politicians and be very aware of who could be recording their actions and how they could be perceived. This is somewhat acceptable as an adult, but it is an unfair burden to put on kids, especially when a 14 year old is really incapable of understanding how putting lyrics to their favorite rap song on their Facebook page may look down the road to someone doing research on them when they are interviewing at an investment bank.
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!
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
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.