Young will have to change names to escape 'cyber past'

Calabrio

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Young will have to change names to escape 'cyber past' warns Google's Eric Schmidt
The private lives of young people are now so well documented on the internet that many will have to change their names on reaching adulthood, Google’s CEO has claimed.
By Murray Wardrop
18 Aug 2010

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/g ... hmidt.html

Eric Schmidt suggested that young people should be entitled to change their identity to escape their misspent youth, which is now recorded in excruciating detail on social networking sites such as Facebook.

"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," Mr Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal.

In an interview Mr Schmidt said he believed that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrasssing photographs and material stored on their friends' social media sites.

The 55-year-old also predicted that in the future, Google will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives.

Using profiles of it customers and tracking their locations through their smart phones, it will be able to provide live updates on their surroundings and inform them of tasks they need to do.

"We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.

"I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

He suggested, as an example, that because Google would know “roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are”, it could remind users what groceries they needed to buy when passing a shop.

The comments are not the first time Mr Schmidt has courted controversy over the wealth of personal information people reveal on the internet. Last year, he notoriously remarked: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Earlier this year, Google was condemned by the privacy watchdogs of 10 countries for showing a “disappointing disregard” for safeguarding private information of its users.

In a letter to Mr Schmidt, Britain's Information Commissioner Chris Graham joined his counterparts in countries including Canada, France, Germany and Italy, in raising concerns over its Street View and Buzz social networking services.
 
A good rule of thumb - if you don't want your mom to read it, maybe the rest of the world shouldn't either.

However I disagree with Schmidt's statement...
“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Something that someone once said - and I have to agree - I regret far more the things I didn't do, than the things I shouldn't have done. However, those things I shouldn't have done - but don't regret - are things that perhaps only a 'select few' should know about, and not an entire linked-in social network. ;)

Cal - I imagine that you are like me - forever thankful that our misspent youth was pre-cyber social networking... :)
 
I just barely made it through middle school. If I were born just a few years later, I don't know how I'd have been molded by the ultra-PC society that emerged.

The concept of everything you do being saved, somewhere, for ever, is unsettling and something too few are able to grasp.

But there's a darker story underneath that.
It's not just that the information is out there, somewhere. It's how it's being collected, stored, and then processed and utilized. It's the unholy alliances that we're seeing form between organizations like Google with Verizon with the federal government. Throw in ON-STAR in your Government Motors auto, along with your cell phone, and everything you do, everywhere you go, everything you say, is being screened, stored, and processed somewhere.
 
I've seen what myspace profiles can do in a civil suit, and My myspace said nothing about me either. My myspace had just one quote on it, "V-tally run dis RaLLy" (play on my name from High school)-They tried to tie it to running, I Don't run. My about me just said I am the Walrus, Goo Goo G'joob, Bitches. Someones comment about my driving they tried to tie to me and my friends being aggressive drivers ( Not my car, not me driving. We were rear-ended at a light by a car, which was blasted at full speed by a drunk in an suv, who ran away, to be caught 10 minutes later). On any networking site I've been on, I've tried to keep information about myself to a bare minimum. I never share anything past marital status, age, and an old picture.
 

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