In a recent interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt rubbed salt in the wound that is Google’s privacy policy with comments that are drawing some serious criticism, notably from Mozilla, a long-time partner of Google’s. Among other things, Schmidt stated with regards to privacy on the Internet, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” after which he alluded to the fact that, with the Patriot Act being what it is, nothing you do (particularly on Google) is safe.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Google is not an arm of the American government. Google has no legal responsibility to hold onto the gobs and gobs of personalized user data that they keep. The implication of Schmidt’s comments is that Google, regardless of its potentially deleterious effect on it’s customers rights (either implicit or explicit), will continue to save and exploit personalized data for the benefit of its shareholders; furthermore, if it’s customer’s rights are undermined, it is THEIR fault for doing secret things on the Internet in the first place.
Isn’t that a callous way to treat your customers, especially on a subject as insidious and poorly understood as privacy? Others seem to agree with me; as alluded to above, Mozilla’s director of community development has gone so far as to encourage Firefox users to switch their default search engine to Bing, despite long-term support of the Mozilla project by Google.
Perhaps Google has finally gotten too large to care anymore. Perhaps they should consider changing their corporate motto from “don’t be evil” to “don’t be evil, unless we can profit from it.” It has been a long time coming, and it is a sad day for me, but it would seem that Google has finally matured into the corporation they were destined to become.
