I’m not sure what to make of the following story that Google got upset with news.com (see last paragraph) over reporter Elinor Mills Googling and revealing (mostly financial) information found about CEO Eric Schmidt.

John Paczkowski thinks this is an astonishing move:

The information revealed in Mills’ article was all obtained via Google searches, but the irony was lost on Google, which, according to News.com, promptly instituted a policy of not talking with its reporters until July 2006.

Google is reported as citing “privacy issues” as the reason for this year long ban (for lack of a better word). I’ve seen lots of negative Google articles from news.com about Google so there could be something more to this than just this Schmidt thing, but wouldn’t it have been better — and less PR destructive — to simply eliminate the keyword searches that reveal all this private information about Mr. Schmidt?

They had to know this story would be slashdotted and bloggers would talk about it and CNET would cry foul. I’ve said it before as more a statement of fact than anything else: privacy doesn’t really exist on the internet. Google should know that better than anybody.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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