I still remember the day 12 years ago when my daughter was born. She was 6 pounds, 3 ounces of tiny perfection. We named her Sarah, after my grandmother, an incredible woman and the eldest of 9 siblings. Her involvement in charities and community organizations was so legendary that news of her death made the front page of newspapers across North Carolina. My little Sarah has quite a name to live up to.
But Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks that Sarah should change her name when she reaches adulthood according to an interview he recently gave with the Wall Street Journal. Apparently there will be so much baggage attached to her name, and to the name of every other child growing up in an age when youthful antics and indiscretions remain on permanent display in cyberspace, easily accessible via Google searches or Facebook and other social media, that every kid will want a new name by age 21.
In that same interview, Schmidt said, "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time." Sadly, he is right.
I conducted a little experiment the other day. I told an intern at our office to use the internet to find out as much as he could about me in ten minutes. The only data he could use to launch his investigation were my name and the fact that I am the CEO of TigerText.
In about the same amount of time as it takes for me to make my kids' breakfast on Saturday morning, he discovered my entire work history, dating back to jobs I had almost 20 years ago, and including where I went to college and business school. He even knew my salary at several of those jobs. Not concerned yet? There's more.
He knew the names of all of my children, where they go to school, and the names of their after school sports teams. He knew not only my wife's maiden name, but the name of her father's business and address. He knew what political party I supported and to which politicians I had made donations. He knew about several vacations I had taken with my family, where I lived, and other more personal items that I am now trying to expunge from my cyber file.
The simple truth is that Google and the rest of corporate America store too much data about us without our knowledge or consent.
Google had already indexed about 8 billion pages of information on the internet by 2005, the last year for which it made such data available. In 2008, the company revealed that it had mined more than a trillion unique pages for data, with plans to mine several billion more. Because so many pages are now automatically generated from the storage of new information, some internet experts say the World Wide Web is essentially infinite. Out there in that infinite universe are many of the most private details of our lives... and we have no control over what businesses access and manipulate them.
According to Schmidt, "We know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." The more you post, search, email, or text, the more roughly turns into exactly. He is working toward a future in which Google does not just answer the questions of internet users, but tells them "what they should be doing next."
Are you shocked and appalled by the fact that every aspect of your biography and consumption patterns is tracked, mined, mapped, and sold? Are you concerned about the easy access that any individual and every company has to these data points that, in the aggregate, define you?
Instead of telling people to change their name to escape the virtual paper trail of their youth and working to convince internet users that they can leave their thinking to corporate America, Google and Facebook should provide us with a straightforward way to put data about ourselves through a cyber shredder if and when we see fit. But the less they know about you, the less they can profit from you, so don't count on anything changing anytime soon, unless we demand it. The time is now for a privacy revolution to begin.
Follow Jeffrey Evans on Twitter: www.twitter.com/YourPrivacy
Lee Schneider: What Are You Searching For?
What i think is important is the call to action. As one commenter put it, we have privacy laws in place for old media and the phone lines. We need to demand our lawmakers put some privacy laws in place. There is need for our DMV records, house transactions, etc to be online without our permission. It opens us up to credit card fraud, stalking, and identity theft.
HP didn't explain the post accurately and made it seem stars were upset, but many actors are upset about imdb posting their ages and exact birthdays for this very reason. It opens us up to all of the above and frankly most stars ages are known but working actors and young actors need to protect this info. Not to mention it leads to very real and devastating age discrimination by our employers.
We need to demand action from our lawmakers and at the same time be very careful about how we search and what information we post about ourselves.
Really?
Really?
Dump Google. There's a great privacy-protecting search engine at:
www.startpage.com
Dump Explorer, if you haven't already. Firefox is an awesome, privacy-protecting web browser available at:
www.mozilla.com/firefox/
Why not do your part? Get started freeing yourself (and the rest of us) from the influences of the likes of Google and Microsoft today!
But it's not like Schmidt actually thought through his crazy idea. Aside from being a professional Microsoft hater, he isn't actually known for anything.
http://www.scroogle.org/cgi-bin/scraper.htm
There is good news though. There is an alternative to the spying eyes of Google. Startpage!
Startpage believes that you have a right to your privacy. We do not record your IP address, store cookies on your browser, or record your searches. Startpage offers an SSL encryption (HTTPS.) In addition, our new proxy service allows you to view websites privately and anonymously. You can visit us at www.Startpage.com.
Once something's on the web, it's there permanently. This isn't something new and shocking, unless you're new to using it.
Google just finds the information thats on the net, its not like they can go to peoples websites and delete information off of it for you. Your a tech guy?
And can you really be a CEO of a really simple phone app program?
http://www.google.com/privacy_faq.html
They do know a lot, but they also don't care about you, they know X person search's for Y Z D. They can use that data to better their software.
Now with the internet it is being treated like privacy is some kind of elusive mystery that we have to find ways to protect. Because the information is just out there in the "cloud" in the search engine, everywhere you post. BS! These are all simply databases that can have privacy laws applied to them any time the government chooses to write and enforce the regulations.
We have a right to privacy and lawmakers need to get on the ball and start looking at this, instead of just rolling there eyes and making believe its too technical to tackle.
Heck, if you really think about it there are already laws protecting phone conversations on the books. Where does your internet feed come in? Your phone line! How convenient to forget that and just make believe all our privacy rights just evaporated when conversations where converted to digital instead of analog.
Also, It'd be easier for us if there were some sort of generic internet info collection "opt out" registry signup, similar to the DoNotCall registry, where the burden is on the database companies to not collect personally identifiable infomation rather than burdening users?