Gross Hypocrisy From Google: ‘We Have To Fight For Privacy’

Mick Meaney
RINF Alternative News

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen of Google Ideas made bizarrely hypocritical statements at the company’s Big Tent event this week claiming that we have to fight for our privacy, while conveniently ignoring the fact that they profit from destroying it.

Consider then, the audacity of Eric Schmidt’s proclamation that:

“We have to fight for privacy or we’re going to lose it. Because it’s so easy to lose.”

Yes Schmidt! Because you’re part of a small cabal that’s invested heavily in taking it away from us!

The duo also attempted to blame younger generations for the dramatic loss of privacy – despite research that continues to prove the contrary.

Bilderberg regular Eric Schmidt said:

“As you age, more and more of your digital identity is determined by others and that indelible record is something new generations will live with for the rest of their lives.”

Sidekick Cohen interjected:

“Kids are coming online and saying things that will follow them round for rest of lives, faster than the physical maturation process. Parents should talk to them about privacy years before the birds and the bees.”

Schmidt continued:

“Each of you completely expects Google to maintain the integrity of data you share with us. It would be a huge problem if data was leaked or inappropriately given to governments. [But it's] very difficult to delete things. It’s unlikely posted things will be deletable and that’s a problem for parents.”

I’ll leave the obvious hypocrisy to one side for a moment and point out that the latest research figures demonstrate that children and teenagers are concerned about their privacy and actively take steps to protect it.

A joint study by the Pew Research Center and the Berkman Center for Internet Society has shown that teenagers take “a variety of technical and non-technical steps to manage the privacy of that information” with only 8% believe that setting privacy controls is “somewhat difficult”.

But Schmidt, who once said: “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about,” chose to ignore this at his Big Tent event.

Google’s privacy issues and law suits are well documented, less reported however are the companies ties to the NSA and its connections to the CIA.

In 2008, a disturbing video produced by Consumer Watchdog demonstrated how Google’s web browser, Chrome, records what a user types into the web address field, and then sends that information to Google servers.

Sounds like a step too far? Well watch this video and make up your own mind:

In 2007 the rights group Privacy International rated Google as “hostile to privacy,” its lowest rating in their report.

When questioned about Google’s privacy track record, Schmidt attempted to defend the company:

“We try to be as transparent as possible… We publicly said these are the things we can do with your data, and it was discussed for months. From our perspective, we disclosed what we were doing, now we’re criticised for not disclosing what we’re doing.

“If we were to violate your privacy that would be material — we would lose you. Independent of whether you like us, we have a clear business perspective to protect your privacy because if we don’t we’ll lose you, governments will write laws that restrict this. We’ll suffer penalties and get sued to death because we get sued for everything.”

No Schmidt, you have violated our privacy, repeatedly and you frequently get sued because your company has a complete and total disregard for users privacy, violating laws in horrendously unethical ways. You’ve intentionally developed systems that are designed to strip away our basic human right to privacy.

What else can we expect from a man who once said: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”