I will always remember him as the guy who would willingly collude with other mentees of Bill Campbell to not hire engineers from each others companies. Willingly trying to keep the salaries of engineers low is pure evil. They even tried to rope-in Zuckerberg into this gentleman's agreement. Zuck asked them to buzz off. When Eric is involved in shady practices like these, how do all other leaders on twitterverse who are singing his praises justify their pandering. I wonder if Eric would have survived now as a Google CEO. Half the company would walk out today, if they came to know Sundar is in bed with his other CEO buddies and has agreements not to poach employees from each other's companies.

You know how far you are over the ethical line when Zuck tells you to take your shady scheme elsewhere.

More likely Zuck correctly saw that Google as the incumbent had much more to gain from such a scheme. Facebook wouldn't be where it is today without aggressively poaching employees from Google, in their early acquiring tech chops phase they were basically the inofficial open source arm of Google because they hired so many googlers who wrote near 1-to-1 clones of internal Google tech and later also released them as open source long before Google ever got around to releasing the real thing (buck, thrift, ...). These days of course, Facebook itself is a powerhouse of original tech.

Apparently FB hyper-targeted Google employees with ads based on the profile these employees had happily volunteered when creating their FB profile. (Wish I had a reference link).

Also, from what I understand (again, only hearsay, I don't have any proof for this), there were many employees at Google who thought "Don't be evil" was a joke.

And so they decided they will go to Facebook, which was more closely aligned with their morals, as explained in this rhyme -

Move fast and break laws,

Lets show these dumb fricks who's boss,

When shit hits the fan

The CIA will cover our arse

> there were many employees at Google who thought "Don't be evil" was a joke.

Well, and the wage theft conspiracy amongst other things proved them right. A smart and experienced CEO like Eric Schmidt would certainly have known that what he was doing was illegal and also that it would be profitable, zero risk to himself and low risk to the company, even if caught. His only possible mistake was to underestimate Facebook as a competitor and the cost of giving them probably more of a leg up than was wise in retrospect by handing them a huge bidding advantage for top tech talent by "defecting" from the collusion. In retrospect it might turn out to have been one of the most expensive rounds of prisoner's dilemma ever played ;)

Well, that just doesn't rhyme at all.

In a perverse sense, it's a display of markets working effectively. The more big tech players entered into a cartel, the greater the incentive got to defect and pick up talent that wouldn't have been affordable otherwise. That doesn't imply anything noble about the practices of the people who defected, but it's an interesting display of how such things fall apart even without requiring any moral action.

Sounds like the "let's do evil" guy

He actually mocked an early engineer who voiced the "this is evil" mantra in a meeting after he joined Google. If not right then, definitely in a TV interview a few years later.

Pure evil lmao

If Google and other companies did this, the employees ought to unionize. Normally I am not in favor of that, but Google et al. were colluding to gain an unfair advantage on their side; that invited the same on the labor side. Companies colluding to keep wages low means workers ought to collude to make them higher and counterbalance the companies.

He's still going to serve on the "compensation committee"..

Those poor underpaid Googlers

...higher salaries in one place tend to pull up salaries elsewhere too. And conversely, if you push down the top, you also push down the middle (under the optimistic assumption that the bottom can't go any further down...).

Also, it's easy for other industries to then justify with: "hey, even Google is doing it, and they were they guys supposed to 'do not evil', amirite?".

That's the problem with unethical behavior, we're all into copying and generalizing stuff :|

Indeed- I thank the FANGs everyday for pulling up my salary. In 2013 I was making about 1/3 what I am now in the financial industry in NYC doing algo trading/HFT. I was reluctant, but after years of seeming to miss out on the big money that everyone talked about finance people making, I finally just decided to look outside the industry. I got a remote job with a company in the valley, and got a 60% increase in comp, that after 3 years grew to just a hair shy of 100%. I was pretty much the first defector to leave finance for tech in my circles, but more followed. I jumped around one more time, with a financial company who truly pays top tier salaries (to match tech companies), and am now making a full 3x what I was just a bit over 5.5 years ago, with a much better work life balance and general work environment.

I can't imagine this would have happened without Goog/FB/Apple/Netfix, etc. Every day I reap the benefits of their competition for talent without having worked at any of them.

Collusion like that puts a downward pressure on the wages of all workers.

It also normalizes that behavior and makes it more likely that other employers will take similar steps.

It’s happens a lot more than it’s talked about. When a few people left the company I worked at for Rackspace who was paying a lot more the CEO of my company talked with Rackspace into agreeing to stop interviewing people from my company. I moved on from that company after the CEO admitted to the agreement.

It’s a practice older than IT. Hard to judge the man on that alone.

You don't have to feel sorry for them, while still disagree about the non-poaching agreements that these CEOs made.

An injury to one is an injury to all.

Sorry but this is just hopelessly naive and one sided. Sillicon valley is more then google and apple, and if the competition is only between them with regards to salary then those engineers have nothing to complain about.

>Sillicon valley is more then google and apple

It is... but the top tier companies pay dramatically more than the next tier down. Like, we're talking 30-50% difference once you count total comp.

(it's interesting, base salary is somewhat comparable... but stock and bonus are a big part of comp if you work at a FAANG company, and those... largely don't exist at third-tier companies.)

The top-tier employers also do a lot to bring up salary pressure on the lower tiers; if the FAANG companies didn't pay so much, the most desirable people wouldn't leave the lower paying companies, wouldn't make room for someone less desirable, etc... That's how I got my start; I didn't go to college, but I did work my way up through those smaller companies, into larger companies that paid better and better.

Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense).

Though, salary for software engineers has been ticking up lately. I suppose I can thank the demand for engineers created by these tech companies for that.

>Very few companies include bonus as a part of a software engineer's compensation (large SV companies are more or less alone in this). Bonuses are generally reserved for executives (excluding sales staff, of course) in most industries, including mine (defense).

Yup, that's what I'm saying. I'm just a sysadmin; I'd never gotten a bonus in my 20 years working as a programmer or sysadmin, mostly at tier 3 tech companies... not until I started working at a FAANG company these last few years, but the bonus + equity is a really significant portion of my compensation now, and brings the whole package from "nicely comfortable for someone who didn't go to college" to "wow"

I'm much too old to work at a FAANG :), I do make a pretty good salary for the area of the county I live in, though.

In any case, moving to SV would only be worth it if salary+bonus were close to half a Megabuck, and I doubt there are more than a dozen engineers in the world making that kind of money as a FTE.

Yes, those quary workers should stop all that ranting. What have the Roman's not ever done for us.

Conveniently you (and everyone else who quotes that line) left out the following part.

"But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we’re all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

His whole point is to NOT use their services because they are bound by law to turn over that kind of data. Not to shame you.

Is avoiding using "their services" sufficient or even possible/plausible? I may be being overly cynical here, but I think it's relevant.

"The homepages of popular sites placed cookies for 275 third-party hosts. In just visiting the homepage of popular sites, we found 32 websites placed 100 or more cookies, 7 websites placed 200 or more cookies, and 6 websites placed 300 or more cookies. We found that Google tracking infrastructure is on 92 of the top 100 most popular websites and on 923 of the top 1,000 websites. This means that Google's ability to track users on popular websites is unparalleled, and it approaches the level of surveillance that only an Internet Service Provider can achieve."

https://techscience.org/a/2015121502/

When toys r us was still in business, I went digital dumpster diving on all the 3rd party domain references to find the companies behind all of them. At the end of the day it seemed like pretty much every major tech company I could think of was getting a hit by my browser.

I'm not sure if this was the exception or norm - I was just curious because their website was soooo slooow.

At the time of the comment it was quite possible.

I don't understand how this part is "conveniently" left out. What about this quote weakens the OP's implication of hypocrisy among business leaders?

I think the idea is that the continuation of the quote reframes "shouldn't" from a moral to a practical exhortation, saying that not being observed is unrealistic and so doing things you would want to keep private is a bad idea because they won't be.

I just went and found the video clip, though, and I think that reading is incorrect. Schmidt isn't saying "don't do those things because we can't hide you from the feds". He's very clearly making two distinct different claims about privacy; the second half is about people with 'legitimate' reasons to need extreme privacy, while the first half looks like exactly the moral judgement everyone portrays it as.

He’s explaining the reality of the situation.

But he’s also disregarding the fact that things people have done, historically, things that have been persecuted, but may only be “wrong” according to shifting cultural temperaments (e.g., loving somebody outside your race).

It’s pretty tone-deaf, in that sense.

Well I am just thankful Google didn't have a Larry Ellison or Rupert Murdoch controlling it. It's pure luck they weren't more evil than they actually were.

I'm not making fun of you, I'm just guessing that the value you get from my service is worth more than the concerns you have about your privacy. Come join me. I promise I won't hurt you so much. You'll enjoy it.

You're free to make your own choices. Schmidt (and Google) make no such promise. Use ProtonMail and DDG if you care so much, others will use Google, life moves on. No one is coercing anyone else.

> No one is coercing anyone else.

Specifically because Schmidt made a career as a lobbyist for privacy erosion, I think he's open to criticism on this basis, even if he is not guilty of coercion.

If it were some random person who was just developing a product I would agree with you to leave well enough alone, but I think the lobbying angle is enough to clear the bar of "theses actions should be publicly scrutinized".

What anti-privacy lobbying are you referencing?

I don't know specifically, I just know he was Google's top lobbyist and their business model depends on a certain privacy law landscape.

"No one is coercing anyone else" - in a way they are. As a software developer I don't think I have the choice not to use one of the big clouds. Protonmail and DDG I do use, but I can't use Hetzner instead of AWS or GCE if I want to remain competitive. (Offtopic: I am actually starting a new project and this is what I'm struggling with.)

The companies aren't the ones that are the problems here if you're worried about the clouds here and privacy.

It is the United States government, their laws, and enforcement.

My point isn't that he's coercing. He isn't. I said that clearly. My point is that he's being disingenuous.

Edit: for the record, I did switch off of gmail too :)

Privacy is usually not about things you don't want anyone to know. It's about things you don't want everyone to know.

Privacy is also about solidarity with those who do have something to hide. We want to create a society with herd immunity for dissidents, free thinkers, and even the less controversial yet somehow still controversial; fetishists, (closet) non-traditional-sexuals, or simply those who engage in behaviour that we have only learned to condone, not yet accept.

Even if you are not any of those, it is our duty to provide a thicket where the free canaries can hide from the harsh environment. When they die, we best pay close attention.

Saying “I don’t care about privacy because I have nothing to hide” is uniquely selfish, on the level of “I don’t care about gay marriage because I’m not gay.”

Several months ago I came across a website dedicated to sharing this mindset--that privacy, even if you have nothing to hide, is good for society and lets people break out of restrictive norms. I haven't been able to find it again despite a pretty long search. Do you happen to know the site I'm talking about?

That's a key principe behind Tor.

I think your second quoted sentence is a perfectly fine attitude. You have to pick your fights and caring about every possible issue that may affect every possible person is a road down to insanity.

(I say this while I agree with your post otherwise.)

His quote doesn't suggest you care about gay marriage. It suggests caring about PRIVACY because for example (amongst many other examples he didn't mention) gay marriage.

I can't upvote this enough.

More specifically, privacy is about things that you want to isolate to one sub-self and its corresponding social circle.

Everyone leads a “double life” (or N lives) to some degree, and privacy is the societal etiquette allowing for the continued separation of those lives (without having to go to the effort of using real OPSEC to isolate them.)

So much this. I don't really want my work, my online life, and my family to collide very much, but within each sphere of general influence, I want to be able to reach out and interact with people fairly openly. The best way, of course, is to carefully curate different identities online, but that feels dishonest at times and can be problematic on occasion.

> The best way, of course, is to carefully curate different identities online

Doesn’t this only work if all your interactions are online? Otherwise your family might meet your colleagues at your birthday party (or whatever you might celebrate).

No this works offline too. For example, I would think that my friends have the decency not to talk to my grandmother about my sexual preferences, even if the two happen to meet at my birthday.

But if you hold your boyfriend’s hand during your birthday your grandmother would probably wise up to your sexual preferences.

Admittedly, Google+ tried with circles but sounds like a bandaid to a problem that didn't exist in the first place until Facebook along with myopic social do-gooders forced everyone to use real names online.

Google+ wanted real names too.

In my view it's mostly about justification.

What's your age, sex, and race? These are questions that, in and of themselves, are not private. Any stranger on the street who sees you could immediately answer them. And if you've ever posted a picture on the net, you can add far more people. And you probably wouldn't be bothered if every single person in the world knew the answer to this question. And in fact you've probably told everybody the answer to these questions, even if indirectly, in your own posts.

Yet in spite of all of this, you probably would not want to tell me. And that's largely because I have absolutely no justification in asking or knowing this. If I said I was surveying developers, and you believed me, then you'd probably be more than willing to submit this information to me however.

Google wants to harvest massive amounts of information on me to, at best, try to get me to purchase things I otherwise would have no desire to purchase. And that is, again, at best. This is the same company that literally black-listed the term "human rights" for their proposed engine in China. [1] To imagine they won't, if they are not already, use that information for even more nefarious ends is being naive.

So on this front I couldn't care less if every disinterested person in the world knows what I had for breakfast (it was muesli), yet I would not want Google to have this information, because I don't think they are justified in knowing it. More sensitive information just ends up reaching a higher and higher standard of required minimal justification.

[1] - https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/google-china-censorship-...

That's the most succinct explanation of privacy I've seen. I'm going to have to crib that line.

I disagree, I wouldnt send a nude photo to a single stranger (even if they wouldnt send/show it to anyone else).

It doesn't sound like you disagree. You might want to be nude in front of some people (doctors, lovers, airport security), but not everyone (your barber, your boss, perfect strangers).

Strangers, sure. Would you send one to a sexual partner?

Medical records are another good example. Most people are squeamish about reproductive and sexual health... but share such info with a doctor.

> Strangers, sure. Would you send one to a sexual partner?

Only if I had made up my mind that I would have no - or only a small - problem with the photo going public. I may conceivably trust the partner. I do not trust partner's ability to keep things under sufficient lock.

In Maths anyone and everyone are the same. When you start a proof you say - Let x a member of set Z be arbitrary

∀≠∃

Which is exactly why equivocation is a logical fallacy.

Long before Eric, the SUN's CEO (Eric's previous employer) made a remark that privacy is an illusion and we need to get over it:

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/

This stuff was going on for a long time, FAANG just perfected it.

FANG maybe; Apple seems pretty keen on maintaining privacy as one of their primary differentiators.

There's privacy between people but not between people and corporation or people and the government.

> Eric Schmidt was the anti-piracy leader who dismissed privacy concerns.

You mean anti-privacy I think? It took me way too long to get there.

I fixed that. Thanks for pointing it out. Not sure how I managed to spell it incorrectly once and correctly once in the same sentence.

ARRRRRRRRRRG ya gots it right again me fren!

Because every CEO is saying "it's okay that privacy is gone! It's no big deal!" I know that one day I'm suddenly going to feel the consequences of their policies and learn by experience that privacy was a big deal after all.

Didn’t he also scheme with Jobs and others not to poach employees from each other and faced class action lawsuit?

> Eric Schmidt was the anti-privacy leader who dismissed privacy concerns.

Well, he did understand how to turn the customers data into a product. He is one of the key persons who formed the whole data economy thing; that's quite a big deal - he formulated the way of making money for the 21st century.

Once upon a time money was in producing stuff, now stuff and people are so much varied so that the main problem is that of pushing adds. This is the way that this age got the tool to keep it going...

Of course the system has its bugs that can be called 'features'

>Once upon a time money was in producing stuff, now stuff and people are so much varied so that the main problem is that of pushing adds

No, this is a very misleading comparison. Schmidt (and others) have found a way to commodify your personal information and how to transfer ownership of your data, and as such wealth, from you to Google.

They're not the 21st equivalent of Henry Ford, they haven't unleashed new modes of production that suddenly unleash growth and drive down prices of material goods and services, they've figured out a way to turn attention into a mechanism to redistribute money upwards.

pushing adds is a service that means it is a 'product' that advertisers are buying. Of course google is also buying our data: its the price for using free products such as search, android and gmail; google is then reselling this data; this takes place either by reselling it directly or by using it as part of their service .

If a fast food chain recorded all customer conversations at its tables and then mined that information for profit, most people would consider that unconscionable - even if the conversations were anonymised.

Similarly most people wouldn't be too happy about a physical newspaper or a TV that tracked their eyeballs as they read/watched it - at least not without an opt-out option.

And yet this is very close to what Google does, albeit hidden behind the distancing effect of a search engine and a web browser.

Should we really be grateful?

I don't like Google. Possibly I'd prefer to live in a world without a Google.

That said, your comparison strikes me as rather reductive. Google Search, Maps, Chrome, YouTube, Android, and so on, are all things that have had a measurable impact on my life, and quite a bit of it positive.

I'd like to think these things could've happened without all the bad stuff that funds it, but at the very least I can't just dismiss all of it.

If they let you eat there for free, I suspect you'd find that significant chunk of the population would consider it to be an acceptable trade.

Terms of service should not imply consent to a transaction: that is inherently a dishonest and exploitative method of running a business.

Also, the idea of paying to use a free service is an oxymoron. Google is not and has never been free, it is ad supported, and it has ruined the internet by normalizing this behavior.

well the whole 'product' is a net loss for humanity in long term and made the whole internet worse for everybody probably forever, so no tears shed for this a-hole

> Well, he did understand how to turn the customers data into a product. He is one of the key persons who formed the whole data economy thing; that's quite a big deal - he formulated the way of making money for the 21st century.

You keep repeating this as if it is somehow axiomatically good.

The surveillance capitalism business model is not one we should be proud of in any way.

I don't like it either (don't work for them) I was just trying to gain an understanding on what is going on.

But the internet forgets. I don't understand how could anybody cheer to him or the FB CEO. These guys are the menace of our age.

People can have nuanced views and don't always mean everything they say 100%.

> The guy represents every wrong with tech. Privacy for him, but none for thee.

That's hardly restricted to tech. It's pervasive with government officials.

He's also a co-author of Lex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_(software)

It's human nature to demonize folks.

> He's also a co-author of Lex.

Your point is?

> It's human nature to demonize folks.

Is that criticism of Schmidt or the parent comment? If Schmidt, he was not so much demonizing people as just not giving a shit about them.

And we hold our leaders to higher standards than the common man. In prior generations, our "elites" held themselves to higher standards as well. Not any longer, it seems. Regardless of how high you rise in society, as long as you can claim decent from the middle class, you hold yourself responsible for nothing outside of yourself and your in-group.

> Your point is?

Probably that the "everything wrong with tech" statement was a bit strong if I could speak for the person you responded to. I'm not sure I'd go as far to say he's "everything wrong with tech", would you? He's certainly done lots of good too, along with bad.

The comment was "he represents everything wrong with tech", not "everything he's ever done is wrong". There statements are not identical.