Can Google Protect Your Privacy?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

I just found a very interesting interview between Neil Cavuto at Fox Business and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. They cover a lot of ground in this interview, but one interesting thing Eric Schmidt said was that Google is going to try not to cross the creepy line. He sees his company a lot like Microsoft, but he doesn’t want to make the same mistakes that Microsoft made and which landed that company in hot water with the public.

If you have some time, feel free to watch the interview with Google’s Eric Schmidt:


The topic of discussion during that segment of the interview was Google’s new Dashboard feature, an information resource for consumers that privacy advocates are a bit leery of. It does beg the question, “How much does Google know about us and how much should they know?” But there are also ramifications in other areas of our online lives.

For instance, if Google gets its hands on private sensitive information that is then shared with a marketer, that information is no longer private. The marketer could then sell the information to other marketers and then there is a huge problem. What will Google do to prevent that kind of scenario?

That’s a question Neil Cavuto and Eric Schmidt do not get into discussing, but it is a question worth asking. As a marketer, I’m all for the liberty to use information to run my business and acquire new customers, but as a consumer I’d also like to have maximum level of privacy. Where’s the balance?