• The Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, August 17, 2010 3:35 PM

Google CEO Eric Schmidt thinks 18-year-olds will one day be able to change their names to safely distance themselves from the online record of their adolescent foibles. That's according to an interview published this weekend in The Wall Street Journal, and then dissected by ReadWriteWeb.

"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," Schmidt tells The Journal. "That seems... crazy," concludes ReadWriteWeb. "Maybe he was simply observing that such policies were likely to take shape in the future. But if they do, the company he runs will be the primary cause of it." Adds ReadWriteWeb: "Perhaps parents should start giving their children short-term names then, which they'll be less attached to. Save your favorite name for adulthood, kids, because you'll need to change it. Google says so." Looking ahead, Schmidt believes that the dominance of search will soon give way to recommendation technology. According to Schmidt: "More and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type ... I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »