Google Douses Privacy Fire — InformationWeek.
Recent remarks by Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a CNBC interview have set off a firestorm among privacy advocates:
Passing on the opportunity to explain to Bartiromo the difference between trusted friends and multi-billion dollar search advertising companies, Schmidt responded, “I think judgment matters. …If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines–including Google–do retain this information for some time. And it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
And the pretty much sums it up about any online company you deal with. For you Facebookers and Tweeters, and anywhere else you post or upload or download from, you’re putting it out there on a server that get’s mirrored and backed up, and probably indexed by search engines. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”