Posts Tagged ‘Eric Schmidt’

Is privacy in the age of social media just an illusion? Signs certainly seem to be pointing that way. Thanks to Google, anyone with access to the Web can quite easily draw an accurate profile of who I am, where I work and what I believe. With the aid of LinkedIn and Twitter, potential employers can form an opinion of recruits without even checking references. I don’t want to debate ethics or the legal implications of such phenomenon, but I just wonder how long it will be before the public starts looking for a way to get out from under the microscope. Or, if Facebook is correct, and we’ll accept that it is now normal for strangers to peer into our most personal space.

Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, received a fair amount of criticism when he said in a CNBC interview that, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” This is probably not what I want to here from the CEO of the company that stores my emails, voicemails, blogs, etc. But it doesn’t make me want to unplug from the web either. I’ve just come to accept the trade-off that balances the power of free-flowing information and our willingness to share what we know.

Popular social networks are literally banking on the fact that there are millions of other people who feel the same way and becoming increasingly lax about their privacy. While Facebook has lured us in with the promise of intimate networks and full privacy controls. Recent changes in their policies have shown that they would rather we opened up and made our lives searchable. After all, that is where the money is. Advertisers would love to know that I’m in the market for a new something-or-other so they can tell me just where to get it at the right price.

As social media develops, I believe the trend will continue towards people opening up and sharing, and over-sharing. It won’t all be bad, because I believe we all gain when ideas are shared and expanded. For now, I’ve drawn the line at geo-location (there’s something creepy about being tracked as a dot on a map). Besides, I still like the option of being fashionably late without my boss knowing that I stopped to get a donut. And it will be a long, long, long time before I’m willing to put my medical records online. Sorry, Google.

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