Eric Schmidt: Teens' Mistakes Will Never Go Away 335
An anonymous reader writes "Speaking at the Hay Festival in the U.K. this weekend, Google's Eric Schmidt spoke about the permanence of your online presence, and how that will affect kids growing up in an online world. 'We have never had a generation with a full photographic, digital record of what they did. We have a point at which we [Google] forget information we know about you because it is the right thing to do.' He makes the point that a lot of respectable, upstanding adults today had dubious incidents as kids and teenagers. They were able to grow up and move past those events, and society eventually forgot — but today, every notable misdeed is just a Google search away. CNET's coverage points out that 'mistakes' can often be events that put somebody's life on track. 'A word or an act can seem like a mistake when it happens — and even shortly afterward. In years to come, though, you might look back on it and see that, though it created friction and even hurt at the time, it served a higher and more character-forming purpose in the long run.' Of course, it's also true that some mistakes a simply indicators that somebody's a schmuck."
Schmidt also made an interesting comment in an interview with The Telegraph while he was in the U.K. He said, "You have to fight for your privacy, or you will lose it." This is quite different from his infamous 2009 remark: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
Thankfully, Facebook is on the way out.... (Score:5, Interesting)
...at least judging by the admittedly small pool of middle schoolers that my kids are friends with.
They flat out think it is stupid, and for old people. Don't know any high schoolers except for the former baby sitter - she seemed to indicate that high school kids were only using Facebook due to peer pressure.
While highly unscientific, *if* this is a general trend it does not indicate a long term growth path for Facebook in their current incarnation. I guess at that point they simply drop the social networking facade for their data collection activities and reveal themselves to be the massive advertising targeting and analytics firm that they really are, plus they start to sell off the impressive portfolio of technology they have developed (which alone is worth billions).
Re:Generational gap (Score:5, Interesting)
Given that the last two U.S. presidents are known to have used cocaine, and the last three to have smoked marijuana, I think that happened a while ago.
This... (Score:5, Interesting)
Kids of today will simply grow up to hold the attitude that literally everyone has made mistakes in their past, especially so while young, and most things a person did won't be held against them.
Everyone already considers mistakes done as a toddler irrelevant, and most do so for mistakes done as a preteen as well.
This will just push the age limit for acceptability of "sins of youth" further.
At the same time, it will shine some light on what we as a society are willing to forgive and forget on account of "being young and crazy".
My guess... Drinking, drugs, questionable fashion choices in the form of tattoos and piercings... maybe even some small crimes like shoplifting.
On the other hand, serious crimes probably won't be so easily forgiven.
But the most fun bit to watch will be what happens to the cases where one's old beliefs, ideas and words are brought back years later.
Will it be OK for a young boy/man to join a radical group based on some rather violent ideas he, as an angry teenager, believes to be true, and later realizing how nonsensical it all was to just move on - or will he have no other choice but to stick with that crowd his entire life as it's the only group that will accept him?
Re:Generational gap (Score:5, Interesting)
Then maybe politics will finally be about the message instead of the messenger.
I'm not counting on it, though.
Re:Generational gap (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. In some ways you can see this happening today - what if 30 years ago a presidential candidate admitted pot smoking? What if a presidential candidate today claimed NEVER to have done it? Would you believe them?
Same is true here. The enlightened employers will get the energetic, creative young people who were willing to get out there and enjoy their lives, not the ones who wear tin-foil hats and button up their sweaters before going out for the day.
Re:Thankfully, Facebook is on the way out.... (Score:5, Interesting)
A more likely outcome (Score:5, Interesting)
The people doing the hiring probably did something stupid as kids or in college, and given a few years, the kids doing job searches now will b hiring managers and HR people and the system will learn to adapt and what to ignore and what to take seriously...everybody fucks up once in a while but we just put our dirty laundry on youtube now.
A more likely outcome is that upper echelon positions would be recruited from socially conservative groups who are not only socially conservative in public, but also socially conservative in private.
These could be ex-employees or early retirement employees of agencies known for strongly vetting their employees backgrounds. For example, there's a reason that the CIA and FBI tend to disproportionately recruit from socially conservative groups like the LDS church. The primary reason for this is they don't want anything in their employees past that the agency or the employees family doesn't already know about being potentially used as leverage and.or blackmail material which could then be used to compromise the agency.
After the scandals of prior years, it's no error that Sharlene Wells was crowned Miss America in 1985 to have at least term of someone socially conservative enough to avoid causing a new scandal before the pageant repaired its ailing reputation from the Vanessa Williams scandal of 1984. They wanted a "Good Mormon Girl" who wouldn't make waves.
Make a mistake as a teen, and you could find yourself barred from the upper reached of money-based power, especially if you compound the mistake by recording it in publicly visible social media.
Re:This... (Score:4, Interesting)
Paris Brown? A "youth ambassador" paid £25,000/y let go for saying un-PC things? Seems like political correctness eating its own children.
Re:What's worse (Score:5, Interesting)
They better not count on that. The Twenty-somethings in my organization a lot more judgmental of 'youthful' indiscretion than my peers.