Just move

On Friday night Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared on CNN’s “Parker-Spitzer” show. In a teaser for the segment online before the broadcast, Schmidt was asked a question about Google Street View by co-host Kathleen Parker, and said that people concerned about Street View vehicles photographing their homes “can just move.”

For *some reason* this was edited out of the segment that aired that evening on CNN but John Letzing at Dow Jones/MarketWatch covered it before it disappeared from the CNN website, noting that Schmidt’s comments came the same day that Google acknowledged for the first time that the company had captured more than snippets of data during the recent Spy-Fi imbroglio - that they had collected entire emails, Web addresses and passwords from Internet users via devices mounted on Street View cars that scanned wireless Internet networks.

Let's remember that in May, Google maintained that their Street View wireless-network scanning collected only fragments of personal data via networks, thanks to the near-constant movement of Street View cars. Which was plainly untrue.

John Paczkowski at All Things D’s Digital Daily also posted a commentary on Schmidt’s “just move” comment:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the company’s “policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” And while that may be true of Google, it’s clearly not true of Schmidt, who lately has been happily high stepping across the creepy line like the grand marshal of the Tone-Deaf Technocrat Parade.

In the past year alone he has:

 

•    Addressed criticisms of Google’s stance on privacy by saying, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
•    Claimed people want Google to “tell them what they should be doing next.”
•    Said of Google, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
•    Said this: “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try to predict the stock market. And then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
•    Suggested name changes to protect adults from the Web’s record of their youthful indiscretions.
•    Said this: “What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don’t do well better.”

Nice selection of remarks with which to begin a Bartlett’s Unsettling Quotations From Powerful CEOs, right?

And Schmidt’s far from done. Appearing on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer” program last week, he said that people who don’t like Google’s Street View cars taking pictures of their homes and businesses “can just move” afterward to protect their privacy. Ironically, he said this on the very day that Google admitted those cars captured more than just fragments of personal payload data.

Interestingly, CNN has since edited that quote out of Schmidt’s segment. Did Google ask CNN to remove it? Who knows. Perhaps the company has finally realized that Schmidt’s penchant for indulging in this sort of pedantic dorkery doesn’t do much for its public image.

Freaking people out with asinine power-tripping pronouncements might be great fun for Schmidt, but it isn’t a wise PR strategy, particularly when Google is a company about which the public and government are increasingly concerned.

By Alex Deane