Google’s expanding empire has of late met with harsh criticism on the fronts of privacy and censorship, but has so far retained a magisterial air—making few concessions and continuing to push acceptance of its new technological paradigms. Amidst criticism that the company has done little to safeguard its patrons’ personal information, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said today that few appreciate the extent to which information is in public view:
“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.
Sounds like a rather poor substitute for good old confession. More to his point, loosening the strictures around name changing would be a plausible, if chaos inducing, band-aid solution to the problem. What’s still more worrying is that our future marker of identity will be far too complex to be reducible to a name.
August 18th, 2010 | 8:23 pm
Eric Schmidt should realize that, rather than having hundreds of millions of people change their names, it would be far easier for them to raid his corporation and destroy his server banks. I predict that something like an internet revolt will happen within the next ten years, and this is only one of the reasons.
August 18th, 2010 | 9:07 pm
Matt, larger operations like Google and Facebook generally have some type of redundancy where multiple copies of data are stored in multiple geographical locations, possibly even different countries.
A better solution than name changing (I rather like my name, thank you) is the concept of data decay. Data is assigned an expiration date when created, and is deleted by the system at that time. One way of implementing this would be to have a user assign an expiration date when a picture is uploaded to Facebook. Of course, nothing is stopping someone from copying the picture and removing the expiration date.
August 19th, 2010 | 7:07 pm
Easiest solution of all: don’t get drunk and nude and let friends take photos of you.
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