Comment by spondyl
3 years ago
> Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appearing on CNBC once said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
It's always funny when Eric Schmidt says stuff like that.
I've shared it before but I'll inline this evergreen quote from a book called In The Plex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27479152
> One day Denise Griffin got a call from Eric Schmidt’s assistant. “There’s this information about Eric in the indexes,” she told Griffin. “And we want it out.” In Griffin’s recollection, it dealt with donor information from a political campaign, exactly the type of public information that Google dedicated itself to making accessible. Griffin explained that it wasn’t Google policy to take things like that out of the index just because people didn’t want it there. Principles always make sense until it’s personal,” she says.
> Then in July 2005, a CNET reporter used Schmidt as an example of how much personal information Google search could expose. Though she used only information that anyone would see if they typed Schmidt’s name into his company’s search box, Schmidt was so furious that he blackballed the news organization for a year.
> “My personal view is that private information that is really private, you should be able to delete from history,” Schmidt once said. But that wasn’t Google’s policy...
Google will decide what people should and shouldnt do. Google will decide whether people deserve privacy in their lives for certain things or not. Language of the abusers.
I al hoping that one day American society will wake up to the fact that Tyranny can, and has been privatised. It is not only the state that you should be afraid of.
Surveillance capitalism is several orders of fucked up, but to call it tyranny is pretty dismissive of the plight of people living under actual tyranny.
7 replies →
Great quotes.
Privacy for google, other corporations and the government is a one way street. You give it to them. There is no reciprocity. That's it. And that's how it's staying. The end.
This is how tyrants are able to talk the talk (but not the walk) and bark out moral high ground orders to those they rule, while doing whatever degenerate acts they like behind closed doors. That's what power is and does.