“Get their data and get their hearths”
(from Michael Cusumano’s “The Business of Software”)“You have zero privacy. Get over it”
(Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems)
Google CEO E. Schmidt said @ Search Engine Strategies conference he sees privacy threats more likely to come from governments‘ intrusions rather than accidental data leaks.
His statement follows a hot weekend caused by AOL non-anonymous search data releasing, and moves the attention from corporate interests to politics interferences in the data collecting context.
We have to keep in mind though that the chinese market issue has already forced us to think about whether companies are able to negotiate with the censorship, or they would simply bow to government’s will not to waste a 1.3-billion-people-worth market.
Schmidt’s words hide a strong – yet well known – link between politics and privacy which cannot be underestimated: whether Google and other companies are fearing governments for their intrusions, or making business with them, the scary George Orwell’s “1984″-like scenario remains.
Moreover, be it right or wrong, taking users’ data into account is an important brick of the business strategy wall, expecially for large corporations – both products or services oriented, and I find people’s questioning about whether companies will stop logging user data quite childish.
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