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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."
Case in point, Emma Way and her infamous cyclist tweet:
http://ipayroadtax.com/no-such-thing-as-road-tax/i-knocked-a-cyclist-off-his-bike-i-have-right-of-way-he-doesnt-even-pay-road-tax/
What's interesting is that she won't take responsibility for what she did (based on a video interview with her lawyer present) and goes so far as to blame her victim which is creating even more notoriety. It's the Streisand effect which makes things worse down the road. If she simply admitted that she was wrong, future employers might consider a little sympathy. Instead all that resides in the websphere is an increasingly bad portrait of this woman. Which appears deserved in this case.
It will be interesting to see what happens to Paris Brown. In case you don't know she was given the job of Youth Crime Commissioner at 17 but then forced out of it for comments she posted on Twitter between the ages of 14 and 16. Apparently one year isn't long enough for such actions to be considered in the past.
Thing is anyone who Google's her in the future will instantly be reminded of this incident and presented with hate-mongering articles from the Daily Mail talking about what a horrible, racist, homophobic drug abuser she is.
Consider that 15 years ago the Daily Mail didn't put its hate filled rants on the internet so a year or two later everyone would probably have forgotten about her and any potential employer would have a hard time finding out about it.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Can someone tell me? He didn't invent Google and while there he didn't invent squat at Google He was brought on ONLY because the VC behind Google insisted that Larry and Serge could not act as CEOs for Google when it was starting. Larry and Serge then went through a long list of candidates, rejecting them all, because they're, you know souless suits. Finally they took on Schmidt because time was running out and they had to take on someone. Before that, Schmidt had been a typical middle manager of no distinction.
While at Google Schmidt's main concern was to tell his longtime wife they were now in an open marriage and start dating hot girls with drug problems for whom he paid for drug rehab and jetting around to Burning Man and generally getting a second crack at being the cool kid everyone wanted to hang out with in high school. . When he wasn't thus engaged, he was saying things which Google had to back peddle on and which indicated that Schmidt was a shallow, coarse, unintelligent asshole.
So why when her talks does anyone care? He's a vacant careerist of no distinction and less character who through a stroke of enormous good luck fell very far upwards in life.
It's all publicly available information and anyone who knows the history of Google from just the popular press knows it's all true, never mind people who know the back story to all of the above who we can presume can't stand the site of the guy.
Please, Slashdot, no more Eric Schmidt said "blah" stories, OK?