Is Eric Schmidt a Little Too Googley-Eyed?
I am absolutely fascinated with Ken Auleta’s, Googled. Everything about it sparks my curiousity – the story of Google, the atmosphere of the workplace, the people who give up their lives to worship this idea. It’s more than a monopoly.
When one single entity stores every single word that has ever been entered into their search bar, and can link each of those searches to an IP address on a computer, it would be hard to make a case combatting the following statement:
Google is the most powerful company in the world.
In a 2009 CNBC interview, CEO Eric Schmidt defends Google saying that there should be no expectation of privacy in regards to their search engine.
He was later asked if he believed Google was one of the most powerful companies in the world. His reply?
No.
Huh?
He explained that just because Google has this information stored, doesn’t mean they disclose it. Schmidt says that Google never uses it for anything.
Great Eric. Well then maybe we should just allow North Korea to continue building their nuclear weapons programs. After all, they say they aren’t going to use them either.
According to your definition of power, simply having information isn’t the determinant of power. You actually have to use this information for it to count.
Google me this…(yep, I said it)
Is the United States the most powerful country in the world? Yes.
Do we use our extensive assortment of nuclear weapons and military against other countries on a daily basis? No.
It’s not what we do, but what we are capable of that matters.
If Barack Obama sat in a chair and said that he doesn’t think our nation is powerful because “it’s not like we are bombing people everyday”…that would scare alot of people. The fact of the matter is that to be responsible you have to recognize your position in the world.
If the CEO of Google himself doesn’t think having, hoarding, or should I say owning all of this information in a massive database puts them at the top of the food chain…I don’t know what will.
I want to believe that he is too smart to not recognize the enormous repercussions a leak in his archives could provoke.
Personally, I don’t mind that Eric Schmidt can see what I search for. If he cares that in 1991 I ‘googled’ the lyrics to every single Backstreet Boys song on their album, so be it.
But don’t go judging me.
And don’t go drawing correlations between that search and one that I did in 2001 for fireworks and think that I am planning some sort of boy band assassination spectacular either. Because that is where a line needs to be drawn in terms of privacy.
At the end of the day, you are a glorified search engine. You provide a free service that is open to everyone at all times everywhere in the world.
You are not the FBI. You are not the Library of Congress. You are a website that links to other websites. You just happen to do that very well and be worth billions of dollars.
So own that piece of it and take responsibility for the power that does, infact, come along with that type of wealth, worth, and access to information.
