Slashdot Mirror
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...
I once bought an Alanis Morrisette album. (posted anonymously for obvious reasons)
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.
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.
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
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."
When the "internet" was generally available in the form of social networking sites like Slashdot, somebody thought the Usenet Netiquette FAQ was obsolete so people ignored common sense and wrote whatever thought that popped in their heads. I'm not sure if people actually paid attention to the Netiquette back in the mid 1990s but at least they should be aware of such a thing. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1855
Honestly tossing a rock through a neighbors window is barely a crime especially when the child ends up having to pay to replace the window. How in the world did you go from that to burning down an orphanage?
Ok, do me a favor and get off your fucking high horse. I have a criminal record and I spent time in jail because of it (among other consequences). There are very few crimes that should follow someone around for their whole life - sexual offenses and first degree murder spring to mind - others are usually just people doing stupid shit without thinking at the time. Should I really be turned down for a job because I got into a fight 10 years ago in college but have kept my nose clean since then? That is kind of like dooming someone to a career of wishing windows for writing down a wrong answer on an exam in 5th grade. Actions should have consequence but they should fit the crime.
The only people who never did stupid shit are those who have never done anything. Those of us with criminal records were just stupid enough to get caught and charged for doing it.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh. " -Voltaire
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?"