Google's Privacy 'Fix' Evades Real Issues

Many Internet industry insiders and observers are attempting to seriously address the implications of technology on privacy. Google's CEO Eric Schmidt doesn't seem to be among them.

When asked about privacy by editors of The Wall Street Journal, Schmidt predicted that in the future teens will have the option of changing their names when they become adults in order to distance themselves from material posted by their friends. The Journal says this prediction was "apparently serious." But it's hard to believe that Schmidt really was presenting this idea as a solution to very real privacy problems posed by digital media. Schmidt must know as well as anyone that pseudonyms can be easy to crack, as happened when AOL released search queries for "anonymized" users. Besides, there's nothing to stop the same people who made the initial, presumably embarrassing posts from updating them with their friends' new names.