Google boss warning on use of social media

19.08.2010

Young people may have to change their names on reaching adulthood to escape their online past, Google boss Eric Schmidt has predicted.

by Rune H. Rasmussen

Hundreds of millions of web users throughout the world reveal increasing amounts of personal information on social networking and other sites, and there are certainly reasons to worry that many may not be aware of the consequences of baring their souls online.

Know who you are
Google’s chief executive Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal he fears that young people do not understand the consequences of having so much personal information about them online.

Mr Schmidt said: "I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time... I mean we really have to think about these things as a society."

“At the moment,” he said, "we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are."

Will store more information
Still, Mr Schmidt is far from a social media sceptic. He praises Facebook as a “company of consequence”, and predicts that one or two more major players will appear in the near future.

As well as this, Mr Schmidt said that Google would likely store more personal information about its users in the future. Google already has a vast amount of data on web users, handling billions of e-mails through Gmail and images of people's houses through Google Street View, as well as the information it has on online searches.

Overstated concerns
According to some experts, Mr Schmidt’s concerns are "overstated".

"The idea that everything is stored online is not true," social media consultant Suw Charman-Anderson told BBC News. "It will be quite some time before that can become true because of the enormity of the internet."

She added: "There's always a lag between the introduction of new technology and the development of a set of social norms around the behaviour that the technology encourages. As a society, we are just going have to become a bit more forgiving of the follies of youth."

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