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Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

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Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#221

Post by icelancer »

PakG1 wrote: post #218
icelancer wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conveniently you (and everyone else who quotes that line) left out the following part. "But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities." His whole point is to NOT use their services…

I'm not making fun of you, I'm just guessing that the value you get from my service is worth more than the concerns you have about your privacy. Come join me. I promise I won't hurt you so much. You'll enjoy it.

You're free to make your own choices. Schmidt (and Google) make no such promise. Use ProtonMail and DDG if you care so much, others will use Google, life moves on. No one is coercing anyone else.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#222

Post by jfoster »

JetSpiegel wrote: post #219

Why is a Google Board Member announcing stuff on Twitter? Is Google wasting all their resources creating dozens of incompatible chat apps, but no blogging platform?

Just to clarify, because we all saw the chat thing. They don't need another blogging platform. Just a modern update to Blogger will do.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#224

Post by noahl »

gen220 wrote: post #40
human20190310 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never understood why Bismarck doesn't get more blame for creating a system of alliances that could only be safely operated by himself.

Ever since I've first learned about his story in-depth, this idea has also fascinated me – but I've never seen anybody else raise it unprompted! The analogy with software is right-on, in my view. He crated a system that was complex, sure, but very manageable and powerful if you understood it in sufficient detail. For a fast-and-loose comparison, he was running foreign policy in Vim/Emacs, while his contemporaries wer…

One of the things that I really love about the tech industry is the way so many companies have adopted a dual-track seniority system, where you can advance as an individual contributor or as a manager.

I'm not familiar with the history, but it almost sounds like Bismarck was a brilliant individual contributor to diplomacy. Maybe what he needed was to work with an executive who would know how to systematize what Bismarck did - and building an organization to systematize what one brilliant person can do is a skill in itself!

But of course this perspective seems way more obvious now, more than a hundred years later, than it would have at the time. And even if you knew that this was what Germany needed, it would have taken a very, very well-run foreign ministry to pull it off.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#225

Post by baby »

fareesh wrote: post #183
vl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schmidt's involvement with US's politics is strange, especially for the business leader: he met with Assange, he went to North Korea. There was a hilarious moment at the company meeting when rank-and-file learned from the news that Eric and Larry met with Trump. Somebody demanded explanation, as if it is something strange that business leaders meet with the president. Sundar mumbled something like "yes, I didn't know…

Some of those leaked videos of the Google team discussing politics with their top management at one of those meetings, are disturbing.

Link or it doesn't exist

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#226

Post by erikpukinskis »

icelancer wrote: post #221
PakG1 wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not making fun of you, I'm just guessing that the value you get from my service is worth more than the concerns you have about your privacy. Come join me. I promise I won't hurt you so much. You'll enjoy it.

You're free to make your own choices. Schmidt (and Google) make no such promise. Use ProtonMail and DDG if you care so much, others will use Google, life moves on. No one is coercing anyone else.

> No one is coercing anyone else.

Specifically because Schmidt made a career as a lobbyist for privacy erosion, I think he's open to criticism on this basis, even if he is not guilty of coercion.

If it were some random person who was just developing a product I would agree with you to leave well enough alone, but I think the lobbying angle is enough to clear the bar of "theses actions should be publicly scrutinized".

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#227

Post by fdchn2019 »

jeffdavis wrote: post #172
basetop wrote: post #160

Eric Schmidt was the anti-privacy leader who dismissed privacy concerns. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/google-ceo-eric-schmid... Keep in mind this is the same guy who blackballed CNET reporters for finding personal information on him through google search. https://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology…

Privacy is usually not about things you don't want anyone to know. It's about things you don't want everyone to know.

In Maths anyone and everyone are the same. When you start a proof you say - Let x a member of set Z be arbitrary

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#228

Post by sangnoir »

shmerl wrote: post #223

I'll remember Eric Schmidt for sabotaging XMPP progress by saying something along the lines of "no one wants to support IM federation, so we should follow suit" and killing off Google Talk (which caused me to lose most of my IM contacts at that time).

About that - Facebook was leaching off Google's network graph by allowing cross-platform chats (initiated from Fb), but Google couldn't access Fb users from GTalk. IMO, it's a perfectly reasonable response in terms of game theory; the best course of action when the other party defects in a Prisoner's Dilemma scenario is to also defect.

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#229

Post by [deleted] »

dekhn wrote: post #9
anyfoo wrote: post #5

This is of course extremely subjective, and I have no knowledge of what Google was and is on the inside except for a short internship almost 10 years ago: I somehow always felt that Google with Eric Schmidt as a CEO was a much different Google than later on. Under Eric Schmidt, Google seemed like this extremely innovative company with the brightest minds in the industry. Afterwards, it seemed to instead grow into jus…

The other big thing was Larry pushed social on the company without really understanding social as a product, and was absolutely unable to handle the huge negative response both internally and externally to that push. This all happened at the same time Microsoft and Amazon committed to Cloud (which Google has only tepidly adopted). The one time I met with Schmidt to explain my cloud project, he was delighted and encou…

[deleted]

Re: Eric Schmidt Steps Down from Alphabet’s Board of Directors

#230

Post by da_chicken »

fdchn2019 wrote: post #227
jeffdavis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Privacy is usually not about things you don't want anyone to know. It's about things you don't want everyone to know.

In Maths anyone and everyone are the same. When you start a proof you say - Let x a member of set Z be arbitrary

Which is exactly why equivocation is a logical fallacy.
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