Slashdot Mirror
Eric Schmidt: Teens' Mistakes Will Never Go Away
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at the Hay Festival in the U.K. this weekend, Google's Eric Schmidt spoke about the permanence of your online presence, and how that will affect kids growing up in an online world. 'We have never had a generation with a full photographic, digital record of what they did. We have a point at which we [Google] forget information we know about you because it is the right thing to do.' He makes the point that a lot of respectable, upstanding adults today had dubious incidents as kids and teenagers. They were able to grow up and move past those events, and society eventually forgot — but today, every notable misdeed is just a Google search away. CNET's coverage points out that 'mistakes' can often be events that put somebody's life on track. 'A word or an act can seem like a mistake when it happens — and even shortly afterward. In years to come, though, you might look back on it and see that, though it created friction and even hurt at the time, it served a higher and more character-forming purpose in the long run.' Of course, it's also true that some mistakes a simply indicators that somebody's a schmuck."
Schmidt also made an interesting comment in an interview with The Telegraph while he was in the U.K. He said, "You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it." This is quite different from his infamous 2009 remark: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Bill Gates and to a large extent MS is now harmless, I propose Slashdot make Schmidt and/or a google logo the new Borge story icon...
I can live with that, but I hate it when the internet tells me to clean my room and take out the garbage.
Also this.
Wow. I'm not only non-social, a non-team-player, but also a serial killer.
Cool, I guess.
Better that than stupid.
also a serial killer
That's so 90's. These days if you're not a terrorist you're nobody.
What's most fortunate is that his post will be found by employment attorneys for years to come.
TFTFY. B^)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.