“Eric Schmidt suggested that young people should be entitled to change their identity to escape their misspent youth, which is now recorded in excruciating detail on social networking sites such as Facebook,” Murray Wardrop reports for The Telegraph.
“‘I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,’ Mr Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal,” Wardrop reports. “In an interview Mr Schmidt said he believed that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrasssing photographs and material stored on their friends’ social media sites.”
Wardrop reports, “The 55-year-old also predicted that in the future, Google will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives. ‘We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,’ Mr Schmidt said. ‘One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. 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.'”
MacDailyNews Take: No, Eric, we definitely do not want Google to tell us what we should be doing next, you dope.
Wardrop continues, “The comments are not the first time Mr Schmidt has courted controversy over the wealth of personal information people reveal on the internet. Last year, he notoriously remarked: ‘If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Maybe the Pink Cowboy should change his name to Eric T. Mole… Oops, that wouldn’t work, either.
“…but can you change your MAC address? – that is The Question.”
Mac’s can mask their MAC address with another one, but not change it as it’s hard wired.
In fact there is a AppleScript floating around that will randomize your MAC address mask every time you reboot your Mac.
Regardless of what you think about him, the point about young people posting things that may haunt them later in life is valid. Witness the myriad of articles about employers searching the web for information about potential new employees.
Most states don’t allow felons to change their names. Many localities do a criminal search before they process change-of-name applications. With modern “secure” driver’s licenses, you need the original name-change court order to change your name on your license. Without a valid license, you can’t get a job today.
Young kids have no sense of privacy. Having taught many 18-24 year olds and asked, they say they don’t care about wiretapping or Google’s e-mail data mining. These kids’ brains are not fully developed physically in areas that really count, like judgment.
hypocrite.
FB and Google have already got all kinds of info totally screwed up because some businesses/households have multiple users and guests per MAC address, not to mention the households with no MAC address and the sophisticated single users with multiples. No way Google or anyone else is going to keep up.
Remember, a dozen federal security agencies with unlimited budgets can’t find an old man in a cave who is very well connected, so it’s not very likely that Google will be able to do any better.
Moreover, FB is the perfect example of idiots posting and embellishing their boring little lives to stroke their own egos. Sure, Z-boy and Schmidt can make insane amounts of money by selling all this info, but many people with productive lives (you know, the people who actually make money by doing real work instead of teens and retirees blogging and opinionating all day online) are almost totally missed in their databases. Which reminds me, i have a meeting to attend….