Google is being targeted by lawsuits and governments around the world with potential privacy invasions, so perhaps it wasn’t the best choice of words when Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the Mobile World Congress in a keynote address a few days ago: “We can literally know everything if we want to.”
Schmidt was absolutely right in what he had to say. The amount of information available about people is mind-boggling, particularly when people use social networking sites to post information about themselves. Just consider the site Please Rob Me. It scans Twitter streams for people who say they are not at home, and then publishes that information on the site. Why does the site do it? To let people know just how dangerous it is to publicly post information about themselves that is best left private.
Google has the capability to scan not just Twitter streams, but information from all social networks, and combine that with your search history, and information about you on the Internet. So Schmidt was not guilty of overkill when he spoke to the Mobile World Conference.
I don’t think Google quite yet understands just how dangerous many people think its power to invade people’s privacy is. But eventually, prodded by governments, I think they’ll get it.
Wow, check that out. What do you think about this “Please Rob Me” site?
It’s true, not only can you find out a lot about a person, with social media you can know things about them in real time. The other idea that is still difficult for me to comprehend the implications of is that information on the internet never dies – it can always be pulled up.
Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always changing the things we want people to know about us and things we don’t. The internet puts a quick stop to that because once a thought or opinion is published, it’s on the record.
This doesn’t mean we should all get scared and run away from new technologies. We should embrace them with the implications in mind.
