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by ccc3
5779 days ago
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He's not creepy, just honest There's a certain branch of honesty that's intensely creepy. It happens when someone is oblivious to the emotions of the people around them, and it's generally characterized by consistently being far too blunt, or dismissively laughing at something that frightens everybody else. Communication is as much about the emotion conveyed as the actual words. If Schmidt thinks it's just a matter of time before it will be the norm to ditch your identity for fear of embarrassment, he's creepy. He's especially creepy because he's dedicated himself to creating the technology that will force temporary identities. The following scene was described in the fortune magazine article: “All this information that you have about us: where does it go? Who has access to that?” (Google servers and Google employees, under careful rules, Schmidt said.) “Does that scare everyone in this room?” The questioner asked, to applause. “Would you prefer someone else?” Schmidt shot back – to laughter and even greater applause. “Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?” A room full of tech journalists cheering and applauding a tech CEO for saying that he's the best person to know everything about everyone is about as creepy as it gets. It sounds like a work of fiction deliberately crafted to be creepy. But Schmidt is insensitive to how most people feel about privacy. He just thinks he escaped a tough question with a clever one-liner. |
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That's it, all right.
It is one thing to recognize that, say, the extinction of the passenger pigeon is inevitable. It is quite another thing to deliberately manufacture a net and then use that net to catch the last known passenger pigeon, and then publicly cook it and eat it, all the while knowing exactly what you are doing. That would be... creepy.
The other obvious point -- or you'd think it would be obvious -- is that the fact that (e.g.) our websurfing behavior is continuously monitored, collated, and sold to the highest bidder without our specific knowledge is "inevitable" only because Google and similar businesses work to keep it that way. Google's business model is not some law of nature. Perhaps the company will discover this when some less-creepy startup company steals a significant share of their market. It could happen.