Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt warned that today's Internet users are sharing far too much of their personal information. Especially at risk, he said, are teenagers, who may not recognize the permanency of digital records.
This, of course, is coming from one of the largest Internet data collectors in the world.
Schmidt was speaking to a crowd at the Hay Festival, an annual event hosted in the UK by the London-based publication, The Daily Telegraph.
During his panel discussion, Schmidt said that today's teenagers will now have to live with the consequences of having a nearly complete, and instantly accessible, record of all of their youthful shenanigans online.
Such instant access to past indiscretions could endanger a teenager's ability to land a job or take up a political office in the future, depending on their offense. In the past, he said, the youth were allowed to grow out of their rebellious nature.
"There are situations in life that it's better that they don't exist. Especially if there is stuff you did when you were a teenager," Schmidt said during his talk. "Teenagers are now in an adult world online. We have never had a generation with a full photographic, digital record of what they did."
Schmidt's comments are a stark contrast to his 2009 comment on privacy, suggesting that if someone does something they don't want other people to know, they shouldn't do it in the first place.
But CNET's Chris Matyszczyk disagrees with Schmidt's analysis, suggesting that the existence of such a constant record could allow teenagers to later reflect on their past activities, granting them the ability to reflect and mature in adulthood.
"Calling one's boss "a raving buck-toothed lunatic, with the management skills of a deaf hyena and the talent of an oaf's corpse" might get you fired -- or even ostracized for a while," Matyszczyk said. "Yet the courage that might have taken could serve to bolster an otherwise compliant spirit and project you to higher goals and achievements."
But Matyszczyk agreed with Schmidt's general complaint that people are sharing too much, like parents posting ultrasound images of their unborn children, online.
The Google chairman also said the Internet search giant doesn't plan to censor offensive, unsavory or extremist videos or material online, saying the publication of such content depends on the laws of the country where it was first published. Schmidt said if they company were to start censoring material based on taste, it could become a slippery slope with no end in sight.
