Google’s Eric Schmidt Wants to Watch You Pee
Google’s Eric Schmidt recently 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 a classic defense of Orwellian monitoring, but I love Bruce Schneier’s response:
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.
[…]
For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.
For those of you who think Google is so great because they have the motto “don’t be evil,” here’s a glimpse at why the motto exists — because Google is naturally inclined toward evil in a way the rest of us are not.
