Google CEO Says: Change Your Name to Escape Our Watchful Eye

[Willis]

From an interview 8/14/2010

Google is often accused of behaving like Big Brother, and Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, isn't doing much to dispel those perceptions. In fact, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt dropped an interesting -- and frightening -- tidbit: perhaps people should change their names upon reaching adulthood to eradicate the potentially reputation-damaging search records Google keeps.


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

Read the article here

[LFE]

Assuming of course that Google has not already created some sort of LDAP like service to just track all your name changes :-)

[LFE]

Interesting enough, Spain is suing Google over data collection:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/18/te...oogle.html?hpw

[Patrick]

Everyone lives through youthful indiscretions. We should all, as a society, move forward from them. Changing identities won't solve the riddle of who we are. Society forgives youthful indiscretions; it just hopes for more in our mature years.

[LazerFlash]

Everyone lives through youthful indiscretions. We should all, as a society, move forward from them. Changing identities won't solve the riddle of who we are. Society forgives youthful indiscretions; it just hopes for more in our mature years.

The difference is that even as recently as 10 years ago, one's youthful indiscretions were barely known outside a small sphere. Now, with the global reach of the Internet, one's indiscretions can be called up from one end of the country to the other by everyone from nosy next-door neighbors, potential employers, casual acquaintances and everyone in between..