Schmidt: Youngsters Will Be Haunted By Online Past

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has warned that young people may have to change their names on reaching adulthood, in order to escape their embarrassing online pasts.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Schmidt said he feared that most people did not consider the consequences of having large quantities of personal information online.

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he said. “I mean we really have to think about these things as a society.”

Bonkers

According to Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, however, the suggestion that people will have to change their names is “bonkers”.

“Online companies like Google should be educating users about how to share information responsibly, with an understanding of the future consequences that may come down the road, not making glib comments about how folks may have to change their names,” he said. “Does Eric know what a pain it is changing your name? So many forms, so much paperwork – a nightmare! And imagine the old email addresses that won’t work.”

Cluley agrees that young people need to think carefully about the information they put online – “Imagine how many future politicians will have their teenage hijinx exposed by what they’re posting on Facebook now” – but also points out that older users of social networks are at just as much risk from sharing information.

“Our studies have found that there are plenty of older people who share a staggering amount of personal data on the web,” he said (including, last year, the wife of Sir John Sawers, head of MI6). “Will they need to keep changing their names too? Won’t this get rather confusing?”

Google knows who you are

Schmidt’s warning came on the back of a discussion about Google’s future, in which he implied that the need to store more and more of users’ personal information would become inevitable. Already, he admits, “We know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.”

In the future, said Schmidt, Google will not only answer your questions but tell you what you should be doing next. Increasing use of Google applications on smartphones means that the company knows, to within a foot, where you are, allowing it to guide and advise your actions in real-time as you move around.

While consumers are undoubtedly sharing more and more of their private details online, the idea that people will be happy for their personal information to be treated with gay abandon is misguided – as Google well knows.

Privacy breach?

When Google launched its social networking application Google Buzz earlier this year, Gmail users were horrified to discover that their private address book contacts were automatically added to a list of “followers” for Buzz. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, claiming that Google Buzz violated federal consumer protection law.

“This is a significant breach of consumer’s expectations of privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC, at the time. “Google should not be allowed to push users’ personal information into a social network they never requested.”

Google has also been under investigation from Scotland Yard, the US Federal Trade Commission and European regulators, after its Street View cars inadvertently collected more than 600GB of data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks around the world.

“We recognise that serious mistakes were made in the collection of Wi-Fi payload data, and we have worked to quickly rectify them,” said Google Geo vice president of engineering Brian McClendon.

Meanwhile, Google’s social collaboration product, Wave, has been cancelled because it failed. Despite this, the company is going ahead with social network integration.