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Thursday, 02 September 2010 22:10

Evil Eric Schmidt Debuts in Video Targeting Google Privacy

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A creepy caricature of Google CEO Eric Schmidt drives an ice cream truck in this video produced by a consumer group targeting the search giant for its data collection practices.

The video is part of a lobbying effort by Consumer Watchdog to get the government to create a so-called “Do Not Track Me” list “to prevent online companies from gathering our personal information, just as Congress had the Federal Trade Commission create

a Do Not Call list to prevent intrusive telemarketers.” The group says they’ve paid to have a version of the video shown 36 times per day on a jumbotron in Times Square.

It’s not the first anti-Google antic from the group, which is largely funded by legal fees, the Rose Foundation, Streisand Foundation, Tides Foundation and others. Last month the group announced it had parked outside lawmakers’ Washington-area residences to determine whether they had unsecured Wi-Fi networks that might have been sniffed by Google as part of the internet giant’s Street View and Google Maps program.

The group did that in an unsuccessful bid to bring attention to the Google Wi-Fi debacle and get the House Energy and Commerce Committee to haul Google executives in for questioning. Once there, the group wanted Google to explain why, for three years, Google was sniffing data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks in neighborhoods in dozens of countries.

Google, which owns YouTube, has said that was a mistake, but legal.

Consumer Watchdog’s brief video capitalizes on the Wi-Fi issue and Schmidt’s previous statement about 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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Authors: David Kravets

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