This was around the time when Facebook had changed its privacy settings, search deals were being made with social networks and people were getting that first hint of being uncomfortable with what information companies were going to use to monetize. This was way before Google entered the equation of privacy with Buzz.
Back then, Eric Schmidt had famously quoted :
If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.
Two months later. Eric Schmidt’s former girlfriend — going by the net moniker RecoveryGirl007 — writes a tell-all blog about her life that includes (guess what ?) her former relationships. So there was a sense of delicious irony in this piece of news :
We’re told the Google CEO’s aggressive lawyers brought down ex-girlfriend Kate Bohner’s online recovery diary this weekend.
Kate Bohner was the name of his mistress. The bringing-down of the website should’ve been fairly easy : It was hosted at Blogspot. Dr. Strangelove was the nick Kate used to refer to Eric Schmidt in her writing — presumably, because he holds a Ph.D. That also explains the title of this post. There are some funny bits about some other famous people. Read that link if you like gossip.
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I shouldn’t really bother about what anyone does in their personal time. It was just the irony of the situation that I wrote the post for.
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I do believe that users need to have a sense of what information they are sharing (it could be inadvertent) with the world. With location-based services getting popular, I don’t think many are aware of how serious the issue of privacy is. For example, sample the recent Rob Me application, that uses location based services to find when people are not at home.
Of course, someone like me recommending precaution sounds way less suspicious than the CEO of Google saying the same thing. But as Kurt Vollegut put it so beautifully, So it goes.
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