Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Shoot the rabbit, not your neighbour


Dominating on the Internet worldwide is Google. Anyone using the Internet hardly can avoid notto use one or more services of Google. In this they are very successful. Many of the services Google offers are very handy and convenient and billions of people make use of them. And that pays off. Says Google CEO Larry Page: “Revenues were up 36 percent year-on-year, and 8 percent quarter-on-quarter. And we hit $50 billion in revenues for the first time last year”.
 That is all very fine, but Google is like a company selling rifles of which they say to shoot rabbits only and not people. Because recently, May 25, 2013, at the Hay Festival Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt has said: 
 “Teenagers can no longer grow up without being reminded of their mistakes because a full record of their lives is now stored on the internet.  There are situations in life that it’s better that they don’t exist. Especially if there is stuff you did when you were a teenager. Teenagers are now in an adult world online. Society has always had ways of dealing with errant teenagers by a process of punishment and then allowing them to grow up away from their mistakes. They grow up out of it and become fine, upstanding leaders, but the current generation of teenagers could now be haunted by their youthful mistakes. Some people’s sharing of personal information online has gone too far. They take things to overwhelmingly excessive levels”.
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt talked yesterday in fact about intimacy. How this is degenerating, losing more and more its quality. 
It is encouraging that the message “What the world has never seen” is manifesting for over 2 years is now echoed by this important business leader. However, he also said Google is not going to do much about it: “We do not plan to censor unsavoury or offensive videos or messages on the internet”.
That is understandable and we applaud that their executive chairman at least expresses publicly a concern we share wholeheartedly.

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