Privacy not in Eric Schmidt's vision of the future

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt painted a messianic picture of our technological future, involving holographic telepresence, self-driving cars, automatic translation, and the widespread deployment of 1Gbps Internet access over optical fiber, bringing transnational peace and communication to all.

Schmidt was speaking at the opening ceremony of the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, the theme of which this year is "managing trust." However, Schmidt said nothing about privacy, the area where users of Google's services in Germany and elsewhere in Europe seem to be most concerned about the trust they can afford to place in the Internet giant. Last week Google introduced a new privacy policy despite calls from European data protection authorities to wait while they completed an investigation of the company's privacy practices.