Google does not give the first fuck about privacy. - "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it." - Eric Schmidt, to the Atlantic - "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions [...] They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next." - Eric Schmidt, to the WSJ - "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." - Eric Schmidt, to CNBC - "Just move" - Eric Schmidt, to CNN, on objections that people have to Streetview imaging their houses - "In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you. We need a [verified] name service for people. Governments will demand it." - Eric Schmidt, 2010 Technology Conference - "In this new future you're never lost...We will know your position down to the foot and down to the inch over time...Your car will drive itself, it's a bug that cars were invented before computers...you're never lonely...you're never bored...you're never out of ideas." - Eric Shmidt, TechCrunch Distrupt - "The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information." - Eric Schmidt, 2010 Google Zeitgeist conference I read his book. It broke Google for me. Fuck "don't be evil" they're fucking evil. And they aren't innovative, they're iterative. Every advance Google has ever made has been done Edison-style - "beat your face against the problem until the blood spots form a Rorschach Test of inspiration." Need a better GIS dataset? DRIVE THE WORLD. Need better search capabilities? INDEX EVERYTHING. Need non-text search? HOST ALL THE VIDEOS AND PUSH INTO VOICE INTEGRATION. There is nothing clever about anything Google does; they just wrap Dickensian brute force in a sparkly jellybean coating. They don't think they're "doing consumers a favor." They don't give the first fuck about consumers. If it's free, the product is YOU.
This is perhaps the worst thing I've ever heard anyone say ever (given that he is in the position that he's in and has the power that he has). It's obviously a ridiculous position, and is a lame attempt at justifying an unreasonable way to do business. As if Schmidt doesn't do things he wants to keep private. Privacy is a right not a privilege."If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Conservatives have wrong argued that privacy is not a right. This was the crux of the Robert Bork confirmation battle: http://faculty.ycp.edu/~dweiss/phl347_philosophy_of_law/bork... Now go read what the 'wingers had to say about Bork. Scalia, Thomas and Roberts all owe their 'originalist' philosophy to a guy who believed that the constitution was written in stone in 1786 and who are we to try and adapt it to fit Google.
So are you saying there doesn't exist a constitutional right to privacy? I find myself having to agree, especially after reading that article, because there is no constitutionally explicit "right to privacy" -- only "certain specific constitutional provisions which are designed in part to protect privacy at certain times and places with respect to certain activities" (Justice Black, referring to the specifically delineated rights provided by the Bill of Rights). And if you are saying there doesn't exist a constitutional right to privacy (only this very judicial-activism happy push for privacy), what should we do? We all agree we enjoy our privacy, but this staunch originalist is saying it doesn't exist in our Constitution. The only protections we have come from liberal Justices but they're not, strictly speaking, constitutional. Is the alternative an amendment? What would it look like? How would you define the privacy we should all be afforded?
I'm saying originalists believe there doesn't exist a constitutional right to privacy. I'm no constitutional scholar, but I know that "the right to privacy" is not spelled out in the Bill of Rights. I've long believed that a privacy amendment would solve a whole bunch of problems. The right to privacy is in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, after all. However, the very people who would need to pass said amendment are likely to be steadfastly against it.
Yes, I think the privacy advocates use the 4th and 9th amendments as Constitutional justification for protecting privacy, the 9th being especially cryptic and non-specific (and the one amendment that nobody really knows or cares about): "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." What the hell are "others retained by the people"? I suppose they're whatever we agree they are. I would argue that privacy is a valuable right that shouldn't be denied us if possible. To me, the 9th (and of course, I'm no scholar on this matter, either, just an interested citizen) basically says that we can't construct any law, or condone any behavior, that abridges any fundamental human right, even if that right isn't specifically mentioned in the first eight amendments.
It's always hard to find clear and concise literature on these sorts of things but my gut feeling (haha) is that the ninth amendment doesn't have an extensive jurisprudence or case history because it's so vague. No judge could cross through that thicket without being accused of making some shit up (even though that hasn't necessarily stopped Justices before).
I could probably list 100 clever things jQuery alone does, let alone adwords, gmail, or maps. From the very start of google, the search processor has had thousands of innovations, which is how they won the search engine market to begin with. To turn your eyes away, abstract a few ideas, and say that things google doesn't isn't innovative is silly.
I listed 5. jquery, adwords, gmail, maps, search processor. If you want specifics here are 5 things they specifically did which were innovative. selectors and navigating the dom in jquery. adwords not affecting pagerank yet being visible/desirable. DOM bindings in chrome. the java handling javascript in gwt. dns-prefetch integration in chrome working in tandem with their search engine.
jquery - a scripting tool. I'm not a programmer and I had scripting tools in Fortran. adwords - an advertising tool. Altavista, Jeeves, metacrawler and others all had said same. gmail - seriously? maps - mapquest was first in the consumer sphere, delorme beat Gmaps by 4-5 years. "search processor?" The google algorithm was an innovative approach but since 2001, Google has been tweaking the algorithm, not reinventing search. I worked a meeting with a VP from Google once. He told a large multinational corporation (under NDA) that Google's modus operandi is to move into a mature area of technology and suck all the profit out of it. They're deliberately not looking for places they can innovate - they're looking for low-hanging fruit they can pluck via brute force. Google Maps, for example, beat out Mapquest because Google was willing to invest in driving.every.road. That's not innovation. That's brute force.
so because google is a computer company, and they make software and hardward solutions, they are not innovative, since software and hardware solutions have already been made? Give me a break. you are oversimplying things and overlooking actual innovation in google's products. The methods they use to solve these problems are different and innovative. Saying that you are not a programmer doesn't make them not innovative. I guess it means that you dont understand the innovation. If I dumb down everything, then of course I could say that it's not innovative. flying car? blah, just another form of transportation. same as walking. so flying cars cannot be innovative. your point is weak. it saddens me that someone would argue it.
I'm sitting here and trying, and I think that I agree with you. As far as I can find examples for, Google just does things better. That's how they win. They are clever about how they go about something, and sometimes their existing technologies plug in in such a way to give an advantage, but in many cases, they just throw tons of talent and money at a problem others have been working at. That isn't to say that they don't have vision. I believe they do. They pick good problems to solve better than others do. You could say that the scale of their experiments is revolutionary. Only Google can inject Buzz into everyone's emails, or throw out a solution without a problem like Google Wave with such gusto. But I think that Google+ will eventually kill all of that. Ok, maybe Google Wave was some sort of innovation. I only say that, because I can't say what it was trying to solve.