> Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appearing on CNBC once said "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
It's always funny when Eric Schmidt says stuff like that.
I've shared it before but I'll inline this evergreen quote from a book called In The Plex: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27479152
> One day Denise Griffin got a call from Eric Schmidt’s assistant. “There’s this information about Eric in the indexes,” she told Griffin. “And we want it out.” In Griffin’s recollection, it dealt with donor information from a political campaign, exactly the type of public information that Google dedicated itself to making accessible. Griffin explained that it wasn’t Google policy to take things like that out of the index just because people didn’t want it there. Principles always make sense until it’s personal,” she says.
> Then in July 2005, a CNET reporter used Schmidt as an example of how much personal information Google search could expose. Though she used only information that anyone would see if they typed Schmidt’s name into his company’s search box, Schmidt was so furious that he blackballed the news organization for a year.
> “My personal view is that private information that is really private, you should be able to delete from history,” Schmidt once said. But that wasn’t Google’s policy...
Google will decide what people should and shouldnt do. Google will decide whether people deserve privacy in their lives for certain things or not. Language of the abusers.
I al hoping that one day American society will wake up to the fact that Tyranny can, and has been privatised. It is not only the state that you should be afraid of.
Surveillance capitalism is several orders of fucked up, but to call it tyranny is pretty dismissive of the plight of people living under actual tyranny.
Maybe it's not dismissive. Both are evil on a spectrum. One does not negate the plightgs of the other.
> it's not dismissive. Both are evil on a spectrum. One does not negate the plightgs [sic] of the other.
There are generational labor camps in North Korea and a litany of horrible ongoing civil wars in Africa. They are evil. So is industry pushback against unleaded aviation fuel [1][2]. But comparing the evils of the civil war in Somalia to those of leaded avgas is, at best, pointless.
[1] https://news.sccgov.org/news-release/findings-county-commiss...
[2] https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/20/aviation-lead-fuel-...
Yes, but your point is? This is a thread about Google and their abuses, so it makes sense that is what is being discussed (not invalidating that there are much worse things happening in the world).
Cool. I'm going to stop calling the guy who killed one of my friends a murderer, or the Sacklers. It's really disrespectful to the people who were killed by Hitler or Pol Pot.
No one has compared them except you. Using a word doesn't automatically mean someone is equating everything under the umbrella. You would do better to focus on the definition of the word if you're so inclined on arguing - "cruel and oppressive government or rule.". I think this holds with the original point that Google can be seen as oppressive rule since they decide the rules, which don't necessarily align with what the people think is right.
There’s a point where the difference disappears, we aren’t there yet, but in a way walking in that direction happy as sheep. Grass is green and there’s only a couple dogs around and they don’t bite, mostly, so all is fine.
I understand Tyranny as abusing your power in a manner thats cruel, unreasonable, hypocritical and unaccountable.
Like you could have a tyranical father, it's not exclusive to Gulags
Great quotes.
Privacy for google, other corporations and the government is a one way street. You give it to them. There is no reciprocity. That's it. And that's how it's staying. The end.
This is how tyrants are able to talk the talk (but not the walk) and bark out moral high ground orders to those they rule, while doing whatever degenerate acts they like behind closed doors. That's what power is and does.