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Rename Your Teen to Protect Privacy, Says Google CEO
Hey kids! Remember how your mom blogged about your thumb-sucking habit — you know, the one you couldn’t break until you were 10? Or how you wet the bed at camp that one year? What about the time you and your girlfriend broke up on Twitter, or that embarrassing picture your college roommates shared on Facebook?
Google CEO Eric Schmidt has a solution for you. He thinks that kids should be allowed to change their names when they reach adulthood. In fact, he predicts that future laws will allow all young adults to change their name to preserve anonymity. Since a huge portion of pre-adulthood interactions now happen on social networking sites, Schmidt argues that it’s in a kid’s best interest to be allowed to erase the those early, embarrassing missteps and begin their adult life with a clean slate.
Just try to wrap your head around that for a moment.
According to Schmidt, the future of Google isn’t in search boxes, it’s in targeted consumer information sent directly to the user before they even knew they needed it. From WSJ.com:
Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Because of the info Google has collected about you, “we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” Google also knows, to within a foot, where you are. Mr. Schmidt leaves it to a listener to imagine the possibilities: If you need milk and there’s a place nearby to get milk, Google will remind you to get milk. It will tell you a store ahead has a collection of horse-racing posters, that a 19th-century murder you’ve been reading about took place on the next block.
But to give you that information, Google is going to need to gather it from you first. And that future, says Schmidt, is going to make it hard for you to hide your indiscretions. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” Schmidt tells the Wall Street Journal.
So the lesson is: Don’t hide your past, erase it. Which is a lot different from Schmidt’s 2009 philosophy on privacy: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Here’s what I think: If the Internet is going to have such an invasive presence in our lives, then maybe we should be spending less time worrying how to help our kids cover their tracks and more time educating them on how to use technology in a responsible way.
That, or someone is going to hit it big with a new line of baby name books for teens looking for a fresh start.
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[...] In truth, privacy may no longer exist for children today. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said younger generations might need to change their names to avoid embarrass… [...]
Are parents’ online habits putting kids in peril? | NMA.tv commented on Nov 04 10 at 7:19 amMichele commented on Aug 17 10 at 10:08 amI’ve been thinking about this a good bit lately. Obviously, kids need to be taught to use technology responsibly, to value their privacy, and respect that of others. But you know what? SO DO THEIR PARENTS!
There are so many parents out their blogging every little detail of their children’s lives, complete with pictures starting from birth. And in many cases, they make absolutely no effort to remain anonymous. This is a fine choice for adults to make in regards to themselves, but it strikes me as incredibly short-sighted to make that choice for a child with no regard for what the longer-term implications might be for someone 18 years down the line, when there is a very public record chronicling their life available for all to see.
And it WILL be available for all to see, even if some parents wise up and change the way they share information about their family (or even delete it), because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this age of over-sharing, it’s that the internet NEVER forgets.
bob commented on Aug 17 10 at 11:43 amA second name is just one more piece of data for Google et al to aggregate about you. Correlating your new name with your old will prove trivially simple, I have little doubt. In fact, Schmidt probably expects the same.
That said, and privacy matters aside, I think selecting an adult name is something everyone should be able to do. The purpose would not be to escape the past, however. Just a rite of passage, perhaps part of the marriage ceremony.
Manjari commented on Aug 17 10 at 6:23 pmI love that idea, Bob.
Voice of Reason commented on Aug 17 10 at 7:29 pmLet’s name them all… Eric Schmidt.
NYCSingleMom commented on Aug 18 10 at 6:40 pmHis comments are obnoxious when you consider what happened with buzz. Even if we followed his advice, google wouldnt care, they would design an algorithm to triangulate the old name with the new name.
Don’t be evil, indeed. It’s seem so naive that so many of us, myself included thought microsoft was the evil empire. How hilarious!. Google is the evil empire.
SuburbanFarm commented on Aug 19 10 at 4:07 pmNot to start a flame war or anything, but why does it matter? The internet is stuffed full of peoples’ minutia, and the likely hood that someone is watching or looking for your data and is willing to sift through all that junk just to get to the “juicy” bits is pretty darn slim. Having your mother blog about how cute your bottom was on the day you came out all covered in goop from her, cough, special place is not going to keep you from getting a job and I would bet good money that your high school chums are more likely going to tease you about something that she did in Real Life then something she wrote about on the internet.
Elistariel commented on Aug 25 10 at 4:00 pmHere’s an idea: Don’t use your real name on the internet.
KT commented on Aug 28 10 at 11:16 pmSomeone should let Eric Schmidt know that kids already can change their names when they reach adulthood. I did. You just get a court order and use it to get a driver’s license and other documents in the new name.
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