Leave it to Eric Schmidt to stir up a hornet’s nest more often than not. Of course, he is a favorite target of everyone since he is the CEO of the most recognizable brand on the planet. Whether by design or not though, he is often saying something or other that is getting people in a tizzy. Admittedly, it takes A LOT less these days to get people into this state and that is one of the downsides of this new digital age. Despite the sensitivity threshold being much lower when Schmidt appears to downplay the notion of online privacy, there will be blood. As cnet reports Google CEO Eric Schmidt is the latest Silicon Valley CEO to draw ire after suggesting that folks seeking privacy might not want to look to the Internet to find it. “I think judgment matters,” Schmidt said, appearing on CNBC . “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines–including Google–do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.” What has really drawn attention to this whole thing is the point of view of Mozilla . It has gotten under Mozilla’s skin so badly the suggestion is even made to go to bing because their privacy policy is better. Talk about biting the hand that feeds. Yikes. maybe this whole Chrome thing is making Mozilla a little more adversarial. “That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy,” Mozilla Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler said on his personal blog, referring to the CNBC comments. “There is no ambiguity, no ‘out of context’ here. Watch the video.” Watch the video? What a great idea! Isn’t it interesting that this whole discussion is brought up on the heels of Google’s widening of the personalization of search results to everyone? In essence, that means that the vast majority of people will be completely unaware of the amount of data that Google is gathering on them anyway. Privacy is for the opt-out crowd only! Ok, Pilgrims, is privacy something that we should expect online or has that gone the way of the dinosaur. If you do expect it, to what level do you expect it? Let us know your private thoughts in this very public forum .
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Google and Privacy: Can’t We All Just Get Along?