Google CEO Google CEO Eric Schmidt says privacy doesn’t matter, but has seen fit to to tell his company that all CNet reporters were to be blacklisted for a year simply because CNET published information on Schmidt’s neighborhood, hobbies, political donations and so forth, which it found through Google searches.

BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow correctly points out that it was Schmidt himself who suggested that “if you want to keep something private, ‘maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place’ (in other words, ‘innocent people have nothing to hide.’)” adding “Hey, Eric: if you don’t want us to know how much money you make, where you live, and what you do with your spare time, maybe you shouldn’t have a house, earn a salary, or have any hobbies, right?”

The Committee would agree and would add that there are all sorts of things someone may need to keep private. Google is in effect, blocking many people from accessing some of the best social tools for grassroots organising by constanly erroring on the side of letting it all hang out.

Ahead of a planned Facebook/Google data agreement, we encourage people who may have reasons to be concerned to increase their privacy settings, delete some information or introduce false information.

For people like myself, Google’s new enhanced public disclosure tactics don’t mean much. I live in UK and generally like being associated with the sorts of activism I’m involved in because I don’t have a huge worry about truncheons or rubber hoses or being dragged out of my house in the middle of the night because of what I’ve decided to say on a blog or on my social profile. My risk potential is not the same as others out there, and I occassionally like to use that for the advantage of those who do run a greater risk. And these are just some of the people who Schmidt isn’t taking into account.

Google is a tool of incredible potential, and it can’t be denied that cutting it out of the loop is a real option for people looking to rapidly reach large numbers of people and get their message out. Its CEO, however, needs to drop his myopic Pollyanna rhetoric that doe s not at all reflect the real world. A bit of honesty would be nice. If he would simply say “look, this is going to cause some people problems, but it will also increase our shares, and that’s really where we’re at,” then at least we could cite transparancy of intent.

There is the potential that Schmidt believes what he says, though, at least to some degree, and that’s another risk. Some people do get greater privacy. The CEO’s own treatment of CNet shows that he beleives he’s entitled to a greater share of it than others are afforded. Information becomes a more potential weapon when there is an unequal level of access to it.

If anything, people should take the recent speech by Schmidt as a cautionary warning. Huffington Post points out that “there’s little recourse for people worried about unintentionally ‘oversharing’ online.” Consider what you put out there before it goes out.

While the Committee seeks to rally bloggers against censorship pushed by governments, business interest and partisan organisations, I think we all have to admit that there’s a more nefarious form that could become more and more prevelent as we enter a more digitally connected world, and that’s a culturally enforced self censorship.

I’ll close with a different quote than BB used from security technology blogger Bruce Schneir:

“This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And it’s our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as ‘security versus privacy.’ The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.”