Eric Schmidt: “We Know Where You Are, We Know What You Like”

http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/eric-schmidt-ifa/

by icey • 16 years ago

18 27 16 years ago

alttab2• 16 years ago

Its quotes like this that make me think that in his mind, Google's real slogan is "Don't Be Evil... until They Can't Stop You."

Schmidt seems so different than the rest of Google. I feel like there are at least 2 internal cultures going on over there.

rblion2• 16 years ago

hahaha. this should be THE top comment but i sense a google bias on HN. do you?

alttab2• 16 years ago

I don't think Google necessarily has a bias, but only drawing from my own experience - technology companies have two seemingly (even though they are not) independent goals. These are to create a great product/app/technology/service, and to make money.

Page and Brin are hackers. Schmidt, while decorated with a Technical past, is a CEO. There are enough articles going around right now that say what a CEO's job is.

I figure a lot of the hackers here may not have the direct experience hearing someone talk solely about making money - taking the product and the quality out of the equation completely. So my comment comes off as abrasive or inflammatory, even though its most likely the reality.

Schmidt doesn't say "how can we make G-Mail great?" in meetings. He says "how can we be synonymous with the web, how can we be the absolute end-point for users and their technology?"

yanw• 16 years ago

So evidently taking Schmidt's words out of context and putting them into inflammatory headlines is the new black.

icey2• 16 years ago

The statement as reported doesn't appear to have a different meaning than the statement when read in context; unless I've missed an obvious piece of nuance.

angstrom• 16 years ago

On the flip side, Google gathers data. It's part of its DNA. It's hard not to sound creepy. It will be officially creepy when he hits all the points of the Santa Clause song.

arebop• 16 years ago

Yeah, if anything techcrunch's new context supplies a suggestion that the reader think about the creepiness of personalization. The intended meaning of the phrase seems clear enough without the rest of the paragraph.

There's nothing unfair about honest editorializing.

jcl• 16 years ago

Schmidt's point in his speech is that Google can use what they know about web surfers to provide better service to them. By cutting the phrase down to just the headline, it makes Google's motives sound more questionable.

It is like the difference between Netflix announcing "We track everything you watch" versus "We can recommend movies you might like, because we track everything you watch".

scrame• 16 years ago

Its from Techcrunch, thats pretty much their business model.

mquander• 16 years ago

I have no idea how this comes off as creepy in an era where hundreds of millions of people voluntarily broadcast their daily activity and all their interpersonal relationships on social networks. Shit, Hacker News knows "where you are" and "what you like" good enough for government work.

rue2• 16 years ago

Privacy is not no-one knowing anything about you. Privacy is being able to control what others know about you.

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

Damn it, somebody mod this up to make up for my accidental downmod button press.

Andrew_Quentin• 16 years ago

Possibly. Maybe, privacy is about being able to control what others you care about know about you.

I wouldn't for example want Nazi Germany to know that I am Jewish. That of course is an example, I am neither in Nazi Germany nor Jewish. But I suppose if I were Jewish, I would not care that the Israeli government knows I am Jewish.

I do not care what Google knows about me. I do not care either that Google knows where I am. I too roughly know where most visitors to my website are. Indeed sometimes I know where they are precisely.

If google wants to offer a service to remind me to buy milk, I might use it. I do not think that machines are at such a level yet where they can control me and tell me what to do next. If it reminds me to buy milk I might or might not go and buy milk. Indeed, possibly having a little google robot to go and buy my milk would be the science fiction future.

If however google decides all the sudden to tell for example my employer that I have said that I hate them, that is an invasion of privacy. As it would be if they told my girlfriend I slept with someone, or if they told my friend I lied to them. Now that would be the fiction future, or possibly the non fiction past of 1984.

jsz0• 16 years ago

You make a fair point but it's still creepy to me. I guess partly because I'm becoming paranoid about exactly what data Google is collecting. I know exactly what Facebook has on me. The other day I was about to do a Google search and actually stopped and thought about it for a second because the search terms I was using were not something I wanted recorded and linked to my account. It occurred to me I might be seeing some really strange ads in the future if I put those search terms into Google. I ended up using a different search engine.

bazbamduck• 16 years ago

Eric Schmidt is hard for me to figure out. On the one hand, some of the stuff he says is eye-popping, in or out of context.

On the other hand, I don't really feel like there's an actual "evilness" behind the words to match up with the "evil" sound of the words. Someone truly interested in leveraging the potential evil would hardly going around making gawk-inducing statements like this. It's almost cartoon villain-ish (and thus gets headlines).

I've tended to think that it's the "well-meaning but poorly-worded summary of what the engineers are saying that contains poorly glossed, uncomfortable truths" explanation that's behind these statements. But that seems a little weak; shouldn't the CEO be better at that than Schmidt is? (Or if he truly isn't, why is he still CEO?)

So it occurred to me reading this one, that what if it is that Schmidt is deliberately "bungling" to try to warn us to caution, in his positive-spin, pro-company, CEO kind of way? Maybe the "foot in mouth" is precise and intentional, designed to get press and shake people up on the topic?

To sidestep the (valid but long and out of scope) discussion of "well, why doesn't he fix the problem?", from a business perspective, he could hardly full-stop the company on data aggregation. Even if he did, Google isn't alone in its data aggregation and more companies are jumping in on the game all the time.

Maybe Schmidt is actually risking the flak to make the point. Maybe he's not as culturally different from "the Good Google" as many seem to think he is. Or maybe he really does have an anti-gravity ray with which he will steal the moon and Miss Penelope Pureheart, bwahaha.

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

Maybe Schmidt is actually risking the flak to make the point.

That's how I feel: if he makes some hand-waving denial then everyone will assume he's lying, so it's better to admit what the potential reach could be openly, and then address what the positives could be. I think their biggest problem from a service delivery standpoint is the difficulty of working with Google in a domain-specific mode. For a while they were experimenting with letting you up/downvote search results, and I was hoping that was going to converge with some of their set/collection tools so that you could build very specific filters (more than would be practical using regex) and save them for later use.

ay3• 16 years ago

I found it curious to put these two side by side:

Eric Schmidt: "A near-term future in which you don’t forget anything, because the computer remembers. You’re never lost."

Evernote.com: "Capture anything. Access anywhere. Find things fast".

Both paint close to the same thing, but with different colors. A great illustration of how much the good perception matters. And being an underdog maybe too.

txxxxd• 16 years ago

Keep in mind you're comparing an off-the-cuff quote to a carefully worded marketing slogan.

ay3• 16 years ago

I meant to compare the end result, not just the wording - apologies if I did not express it clearly.

I think I found a way to put it differently: in one case it is the user that lets the company collect the data, in the other case it is the company that lets the user collect the data.

To make the data equivalently useful, I would want to make it the most complete - so asymptotically I would get the same data set collected in both cases. But if this all is done with my consent, I would feel more in control about it - even if "yes to all" is more efficient for me.

shadowfox• 16 years ago

In the case of EverNote, dont you have to take the step of actively capturing what you are doing in order to make it remember it?

ay3• 16 years ago

Yes, I have just replied to the sister comment - I think this is precisely what makes the difference in perception.

ciupicri• 16 years ago

> While I’m sure Schmidt has the best intentions here, it’s probably time he got a PR person or maybe even a friend that can clue him into the fact that statements like “We know where you are, we know what you like” can come off a little creepy

So he should get a PR person to rephrase that statement until it sounds good, but no one understands what it really means? I fail to see how that statement could be rephrased and TechCrunch doesn't offer any suggestions either.

rblion2• 16 years ago

And then God became Google. Self became Facebook. Man became Machine.

We Love Big Google!...wait, or is it 'Like' now?

Eric Schmidt: “We Know Where You Are, We Know What You Like”

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