The 15 Wildest Things Google Chairman Eric Schmidt Has Ever Said
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Jul 26, 2021, 12:44 IST
On privacy: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
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On Google's famous "Don't Be Evil" rule: "When I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there's no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something."
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On competition: "Our business strategy is not to compete."
On what Google can do: “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market … and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
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On Google's staggering collection of personal info: "Would you prefer someone else? Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?"
On getting caught on Google Street View: "With Street View, we drive by exactly once, so you can just move."
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On chance: "Serendipity can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically."
On Google searches: "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
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On what people want: “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. … Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”
On the future of individual targeting: "The technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them."
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On the Android operating system: "Not secure? It's more secure than the iPhone."
On being creepy: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
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On uses for Google Glass: "There's obviously issues, shall we say, of appropriateness of how people are going to use these things. There's a right time to have Google Glass on, and there's a right time to have it off, if you take my drift."
On the NSA: "There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society."
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On the global warming "fact problem": "The media gets confused because they don't believe in facts, and public policy people get confused because they don't believe in innovation."