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."
is many of them don't realize the long term ramifications of what they are making readily available online. They think that simply because they limit access to a few friends or don't tag the pictures with their names they are keeping things private. Coupled with a belief "people won't or don't care" makes them somewhat oblivious to the privacy issues. Unfortunately, when they don't get / lose a job because of something that was found online they will realize the importance; but it will be too late. Granted, people make mistakes and shouldn't bear the burden of them forever; but if given the choice between candidate A, where you can find those mistakes on line, and B, where you can't, B will generally win.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Kids of today will simply grow up to hold the attitude that literally everyone has made mistakes in their past, especially so while young, and most things a person did won't be held against them.
It will really be our generation that has the hardest time with this.
Both in expecting out of others what you are unable and unwilling to do yourself, as well as "losing out" due to the consequences of doing so.
Once that kid grows up and looks for a job, it will be those of us who are older who will still hold childhood mistakes against them and miss out of any and all benefits they would bring to the company.
At the same time that grown kid will not have similar issues applying for work with their peers, so those companies will gain and move ahead.
Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes.
It's not my quote, but Ghandi's, and it perfectly fits the current digital age. It's not the things that go well and without effort that make you, but it's the mistakes that make a difference, if you learn from them at least. And if you don't, well they make a difference as well of course, but not for the better.
On the other hand, online mistakes maybe follow you along. If you can handle them at a later age, it might be no different than now. Pictures are another thing however. They make an impression that is not easily forgotten.
so nobody will give a crap about "minor" stuff in 10 years. it's crap overload.
nobody gives a crap about pamela anderson sex vid even now, mind you. that's not what defines her.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Actually, this might be a good thing. See, up until now, human beings have engaged repeatedly in trying to cover up their mistakes; this would not be such an issue if it did not require making more mistakes.
By allowing for a more accurate record of mistakes, society will be forced to evolve beyond its current idiotic game of 'hide the sin, then seize the moral high ground' which many of its officers currently engage in. The only potential problem are the paranoid powerful ones who think ghosts are chasing them seeking vengeance for their past actions -> they're the ones likely to set a match to civilization to try and burn any copies of their past mistakes. "Though no one is chasing them, they still run."
But then, the human ego is a delicate thing, and much of humanity has evolved to be a social species...like coral....so the thought of the scrutiny of the world, tempered like a blade, suddenly thrust upon a single person, is perhaps too much to bear.
I am John Hurt.
I fear it may even be the opposite: applicants for whom a Google search doesn't return every detail of their lives will be labeled too antisocial for the job.
Back when the Internet was a new thing, I remember the cartoon of the dogs on a computer with the caption, On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog.
Unfortunately, this is not true any more. The hive mind of the Internet never seems to forget and this may have consequences we can not even imagine yet. I am now in my mid sixties and have seen the world change from where the mistakes of youth did not come back to haunt you in latter life. I doubt that this will be true for anyone growing up now.
One of the things not often appreciated is just how much my country, The United States, owes to people who came here in order to leave their past behind and start over. Even in our country, until very recently, it was possible to begin anew and leave the past behind. Yes, there were some negative aspects of this. I am sure that there are unsolved crimes committed by the ones that "got away". One of the popular genres of TV shows is that of solving cold cases. However, the benefit of being able to "start over" seems to outweigh the risk of those that get away. Even in law there are Statute of Limitations for most crimes and sometimes I think the Internet needs a statute of limitations on how long it "remembers" some things.
Making mistakes is a part of learning and growing up. A person in their teens is not the same person in their late twenties, and by the time they are in their fifties or beyond they have probably changed again. Giving people the room and freedom to grow and start over is as important to society as almost anything.
As the engineers I used to work with often said about a failed rocket launch, "we learn the most from our mistakes - they blow up."
For those of us who worked on some of the old "Big Iron" mainframe systems we can remember that most forms of storage required specifying a retention date or retention period. After which time the data would be deleted. If one needed the data the owner could change the date before it was deleted. I think that some sort of retention period should be applied to all social media sites, and other sites that hold personal information. Perhaps we should start a Give the Internet Amnesia movement!
Bad experiences can be character-forming, but character forming goes both ways.
Employers look at a person's history while hiring. A person with a clear history or a history of positive contributions is going to have a leg up when it comes to securing employment. A person which has a history of negative decisions is going to have less success securing employment.
Making everyone's life an open book doesn't solve that problem because it is based upon a bunch of false premisses. It is based upon the make-believe notion that everyone makes mistakes, and the fictional notion that everyone makes similar types of mistakes.
First of all, some people make far fewer mistakes than other people. A person who studied hard in college is probably going to frown upon a person who partied hard in college. A person who steered clear of drugs is probably going to look down upon a person who got sucked in by drugs. Even if the person who made irresponsible decisions turned their life around, the person who demonstrated responsibility throughout their life may still hold a dim view of them.
Even if people made mistakes in similar quantities, different types of mistakes have different social stigmas. A teenager caught DUI may be branded, but a lot of people will overlook that 10 years down the road because a lot of teenagers do stupid things. If that teenager killed a person while DUI they will be branded for life. Same mistake, different outcome, different social stigma. Don't think that stuff like that is posted online? Think again. People post videos of assaults and rapes online then harass the victim over it (a teen in my area recently killed herself because of that).
So yeah, posting mistakes online is an issue.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Like so many, he is mistaking "anyone" for "everyone".
I have tons of things I don't want everyone to know, though I don't mind of some specific people do.
We all have.
And then there's degrees. I don't mind telling people about some of the mistakes I made. I don't see why I should go into the details. I don't make a secret of who I'm with or who I've been with, but I wouldn't want to have a list published somewhere. I'm sure even Schmidt or Zuckerberg don't want videos of their last night of sex online for the world to see, even though they'll probably have no problem saying that they've had sex that night on public TV. But there are degrees of disclosure and privacy.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org