Pride goes before the Fall (Google, it's already August)
Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said in a speech yesterday at the Search Engines Strategy Conference that the real threat to privacy is not corporate screwups, but government interference.
Mr. Schmidt smugly assured the crowd that Google had put in adequate safeguards to protect their data and although they had considered deleting search histories after a few months, decided that they didn't need to because they were safe enough.
Right.
Referring to the AOL screwup last week, Schmidt termed the data release "accidental", I suppose because they got caught.
Schmidt raised the spectre of a government--any government--wresting the search data from Google.
No computer system is secure. The more value in the data, the more effort and resources will be applied to the problem and Google is one of the best targets in cyberspace.
I predict that they will be hacked...bigtime hacked. Not by the government because I suspect that Google already has some kind of relationship with NSA, otherwise they'd be getting beat up by the Justice Department more than they have. No, they will be attacked by some 17 year old French kid. If that's what it takes to break through the entrenched Silicon Valley cyberNarcissistic mind set that nothing can happen to them, then so be it.
Posted on August 10, 2006
