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.
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.
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.
so nobody will give a crap about "minor" stuff in 10 years. it's crap overload.
The world will not. But individuals will.
Imagine meeting your dream partner, the perfect girl/guy. And then losing her because of something stupid you did 10 years before, something you yourself had forgotten, but since there's a record of everything, someone who didn't like you dug it up and sent it to her.
(and don't tell me your perfect partner wouldn't judge you based on something so long ago, I intentionally left it open what it could've been.)
There's a reason that even criminal records get cleaned after some time. Both psychologists and neurologists have found how important forgetting is to the human mind. And sociologists know how important it is to a society.
Everything memorized for all times isn't a dream, it's a nightmare. Not because of any small cultural thing that'll just have to change, but because of fundamental human factors that don't change as easily or quickly as technology does.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org