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Comment by litewulf | Hacker News Reader

Have you seen the full quote?

"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."

In this context, and not in the pull-quote part everyone loves, I think his meaning is quite clear. Your expectation of privacy is flawed because of the legal system you (probably) operate within. I'm trying to imagine what you want him to say: "We think privacy is important so we ignore federal laws for geek cred WHOOO". Does that seem like a prudent thing to say as the CEO of a major American firm?

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No law compels Google to retain user information.

It is misleading to suggest that Google isn't deliberately retaining information and that it is just trying to comply with the law. The law only states (in some circumstances) that any "retained" information must be provided to the govt

Which has what to do with the out of context quote?

I've seen this fifty times now:

"Google says no one can have privacy!" "No, that's not what he said. He said not to use public things if you want to remain private." "Well then Google shouldn't retain user information!" "OK, but what does that have to do with you making misleading comments about what he said?" "-1"

what is misleading about what I said ?

please answer that without making up any quotes.

Logging is useful for debugging issues that crop up in production, conducting A/B tests, and generally making things work, and work well. There is a fairly nuanced judgement here in terms of how much information one should collect weighed against the privacy woes that legislation can impose.

I am not sure you realize the ramifications of what you are suggesting, or, we simply have differing systems of values.

And yet retaining information is only part of the problem. The Patriot Act can put some pretty demanding requirements on companies such as Google. They can be asked, if not obliged to cooperate with investigations by providing search data or email headers.

Take for example this article by the ACLU, in particular the Pen register searches applied to the Internet section (http://www.aclu.org/national-security/surveillance-under-usa...). I'm not a lawyer, but given those guidelines the query string variables used by Google seem to be within the purveys of the law. Subsequently they are required to allow the appropriate government agencies to access these requests if they so desire.

In brief, Schmidt's quote is incredibly relevant, because people might be mistaken about what is private under the law. He suggests that people adopt a common sense approach to their activities, especially the ones they consider of a sensitive nature. Instead of suggesting people become familiar with very complex legal documents or adopt a false sense of security. People need to stop thinking that all transactions with web servers are somehow private or privileged, when the government clearly does not want them to be.

So in context, we should cut Schmidt slack for enthusiastically following and enforcing an unjust law, and even worse, profiting from it?

No, you're right. Instead you should quote him out of context and suggest he's saying no one should have privacy.

That seems like the smartest thing to do. Certainly gets you more up votes here.

His point is Google can't really make any stand about the justness of the law; they have to follow it to the letter (and, yes, help lobby for change if they want - but that is a separate issue).

His point was simple and very clear: if your doing something the law considers illegal you should be taking more care to cover your tracks, don't blame Google.

Fucking thank you.

Do you have a twitter or something? You just made me want to listen to more of what your obviously sensible brain has to say :D

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