Google CEO Schmidt Predicts End of Online Anonymity

Google CEO Schmidt Predicts End of Online Anonymity.

The madness of being a CEO is making predictions that will never be 100% true.

-- Tom

 

He wants to kill anonymity with passports to try combat criminals, the only people that could get past this "security" measure making it worthless. Makes sense to me!

 

He's a twat.

Some could call what is company does fits those descriptions.

They might do, so vote them out, or not in, in the first place.

I call that more than creepy, i call it criminal and 'anti-social' behavior

 

Between this idiot and Mark Zuckerburg, people online don't stand a chance, never mind the government. "The CEO of Google also made a couple of somewhat creepy references to the availability of information: 'If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use artificial intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go ... show us 14 photos of yourself and we can identify who you are. You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!'"...Oh, so NOW we know just what kind of data you're collecting there, eh?

I've warned about Facebook time and time again, nobody cares, "it's too fun" "it helps me stay in contact with people"....so do phones, emails, and face to face meetings. I USED to warn about Google, then gave them the benefit of the doubt, they shot themselves in the foot. I decided to give them the benefit again as incident after incident came, created a firestorm, then died down. Well, now that this man opened his mouth, I refuse to keep giving the benefit of the doubt.

Anyone want to give Chrome a go? Anyone?

 

"You think you don't have 14 photos of yourself on the internet? You've got Facebook photos!'" ​

No, Mr. Schmidt, believe it or not, some of us DON'T have Facebook photos.

 

*gasp* I found another one like me? *waves at Lockbox* I thought I was alone! hehe.

 

no facebook photos here either. no facebook account either. 2 fingers to FB et al

 

Schmidt may be a billionaire but he is still a pimply-faced rat-monger.

 

Dear god. Not another article whose sole purpose is to whip up the ignorant masses into a frenzy by dishing out misrepresented information.

May I suggest that some people do themselves a favor. Sit down for a while, ask yourself how do you define "privacy", and then try to figure out how, why, and by who exactly is that "privacy" being eroded.

 

Not Chrome, but I use Chromium, and I trust it 100%. Why? Because the source-code is open which is something M$ will not do with IE.

 

So what?

 

So they're not open source! Which makes them proprietary! And evil! Come on, can't you see that we have the greedy capitalist companies on one side, and the open-source freedom fighters championing all that is good and just on the other? Open your eyes and see the truth!

 

There are a group of "dangerous subversives" around here who just aren't biting LOL.

Join Us ....

 

The fact you have to ask that question means that me explaining it will do no good either. And contrary to what Eice says, I didn't bring M$ up because I was picking on them specifically. I could have used Opera as another example. People seem to trust Opera even though they can't read a single line of its code. Yet people will pick on Chrome/Chromium even though it is 100% open-source.

 

The fact is that most people can't read code anyway, even if it were made available to them. The fact is that people also DON'T read code even when it's made available to them. So you trust Chromium. I suppose that's because you've read every single byte of code of every one of its components, from the UI to the network stack?

Or take Linux. I'm sure you trust your open-source operating system. Does that trust stem from the fact that you've read all the code for the kernel, every other OS component, every app that comes with the OS, and then compiled everything from scratch?

Of course you haven't. There's no point in being so pedantic. It's silly.

 

Eice:

Chronomatic posts in the privacy sub-forums because he cares about privacy. And you?

I've never quite understood the purpose of some of you coming here and arguing with seemingly everything. If privacy issues are of no concern to you - and your posting history all over this board proves that to be the case - why bother coming here just to call people names and act so superior?

Chronomatic is neither overly-pedantic or "silly."

 

I care about privacy too. Which is why I'm posting here. Perhaps the difference is that I pursue a more practical view of privacy, one which doesn't involve reading the source code of the programs I use and compiling them myself as a necessary evil, or subscribing to the oversimplified view that a program is trustworthy if it's open-source and vice versa.

I'm not sure which bone you're trying to pick with who, but I believe you've apparently suffered from a misfire.

 

No, it's not being pedantic. Of course I haven't read all the code to the linux kernel -- it takes people with specialized knowledge to do systems programming (i.e., kernel and driver development). But the fact that everything *can* be read makes it much less likely that the devs would try any funny business because someone somewhere who does understand the code will eventually find it. It's just a matter of time.

This is especially true with browsers, where the programming is usually done at a bit of a higher level and doesn't take as much esoteric knowledge. It would be fairly difficult to inject some major privacy buster into Chromium or Firefox. And even if there was, any programmer could create his own hacked version fairly easily (which is what we see with projects like SWIron). Try that with IE or Opera.

 

Also see Google's Schmidt: Society not ready for technology...

 

Note that the company claims: “Google is committed to advancing privacy and freedom of expression for our users around the world” (see Code of Conduct). Apparently, this commitment may not encompass anonymity.

 

No offense, but I find this extremely... amusing. Do you honestly believe that reading source code is the only way to discover how a program works? Really??

It's not. In the anti-malware industry, for example, none of the products are open-source, yet they're being reverse-engineered, replicated, detected, targeted, and studied in exceedingly intimate detail on an hourly basis by both sides. The malware writers figure out how scanning engines and signatures work, and tweak their malware to bypass them, while anti-malware researchers disassemble and analyze malware, and create generic/heuristic detection strings for them. These operations do not involve reading source code.

As for browsers, it's laughably easy to figure out their behavior - regardless of whether they're open-source - by using a firewall to see where they're connecting to, and Wireshark or some other packet sniffer to log and inspect packet contents. In fact, this approach is probably much more efficient and easy than reading source code.

I think the reason nobody has created SWIron equivalents for IE and Opera is because there's no need to, since they DON'T come with major privacy busters in the first place. That aside, IE8 does in fact come in several tweaked flavors, while the lack of Opera variants is probably due to low market share (and hence lack of demand).

 

FYI -- For a very thoughtful examination of the “many-eyeballs argument,” please see: Microsoft’s Many Eyeballs and the Security Development Lifecycle.

 

Given how just about EVERY open-source software advocate I've run into has fallen back to the argument that "oh, someone else will read and verify the code, therefore I'm sure this open-source product is safe", I'm hardly surprised.

 

Interestingly economics research has shown that monetary gain is not the primary motivator for high achievement, contrary to what Crispin Cowan states here:

First of all, Cowan (a former Linux security developer) works for Microsoft. One must keep that in mind.

Secondly, he didn't get much code review for his project because no one cared! Give the people a project they are interested in helping, something where code integrity really matters. Let people audit the Linux kernel itself or, say, encryption software like dm-crypt/LUKS, GnuPG or Truecrypt. Let people audit software where security really matters and you'll see better results than you will by just throwing up some arbitrary website. Indeed, Linus Torvalds sometimes gets frustrated because he says that too many people want to audit the kernel for flashy security bugs and too often ignore mundane, run of the mill bugs.

Thirdly, Cowan's conclusions are dead wrong. Cowan is not an economist or psychologist, he is a software developer; he doesn't have the credentials or expertise to conduct such a study. Research done at MIT (and other places) has shown exact opposite conclusions. These studies have shown that people are more motivated by fame (and ego) than they are money. They call it "purpose driven motivation." There is a video at YouTube that is a must watch if you want a short introduction to these studies and their conclusions.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

 

Well at least in one aspect, that of browsers, the Firefox experience has shown that "open" can come up with something much better than "closed". (I would have mentioned Chrome as well but that seems to arouse undue hysteria.)