“There is what I call the creepy line,” Eric Schmidt said last Friday at the Washington Ideas Forum. “The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
The statement was made in response to a question by The Atlantic’s James Bennet, asking if Google had any plans to implant technology into people’s brains.
“I would argue that implanting something in your brain is beyond the creepy line,” explained Schmidt, “at least for the moment, until the technology gets better.” Eric, I’m not gonna tell you how to do your job, but isn’t that something you shouldn’t say when the whole world is on edge about privacy?
“With your permission,” remarked Schmidt about the current state of the Googles, “you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches…We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less now what you’re thinking about.”
I wouldn’t call that a creepy line, so much as a creepy grey area. But at least Schmidt was joking about the brain implant thing.
“As far as I know, we do not have a medical lab working on implants,” he assured everyone.
“As far as I know. I will check after this.”
Oh, Eric.
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