Eric Schmidt Tells Charlie Rose Google Is “Unlikely” To Buy Twitter And Wants To Turn Phones Into TVs
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/07/eric-schmidt-tells-charlie-rose-google-is-unlikely-to-buy-twitter-and-wants-to-turn-phones-into-tvs/

Charlie Rose interviews Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google.

There are roughly a billion more mobile phones coming online in the next three to three and a half years, that extra billion voices are voices we have never heard in languages we don’t speak. We have no idea what they’re going to tell us, but they’re going to be heard.

Via Michal's blog

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives. Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance. We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need. For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

Bruce Schneier once again gets good mileage out of his earlier essay on the value of privacy. This time quoting portions in response to a remark made by Eric Schmidt with the typical "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place" argument.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

Chief executive hints that Google could go into partnership with Twitter

May 19 2009

But he admitted that there is a trade-off between making information instantly available and ensuring its accuracy.

Google admits losing out to Twitter in real-time information provision http://bit.ly/16x3sR [from http://twitter.com/r1tz/statuses/1934493073]

Is The Guardian's Web site crashing because of the article about the partnership between Google & Twitter? http://bit.ly/16x3sR [from http://twitter.com/LoXD/statuses/1861951800]

RT @problogger: Reading: Google 'falling behind Twitter' - http://is.gd/BqnD [from http://twitter.com/chadwalker/statuses/1858252209]

accuracy vs speed

But, is there any truth to rumours of a merger?

Schmidt says "Speaking as a computer scientist, I view all of these as sort of poor man's email systems". Has he missed something?

Sergey Brin: "In other words, they have aspects of an email system, but they don't have a full offering. To me, the question about companies like Twitter is: Do they fundamentally evolve as sort of a note phenomenon, or do they fundamentally evolve to have storage, revocation, identity, and all the other aspects that traditional email systems have? Or do email systems themselves broaden what they do to take on some of that characteristic?

ツンデレ >Schmidt also plugged Google's new Twitter account