Remember when some people you didn’t know mapped out where you live and put it on the public domain, all without asking first? That’s because you weren’t looking, or at least you weren’t on the lookout for it.

Google Street View has become famous for two things: dorks that want to get internet-famous and displaying your house to the entire world. Google isn’t exactly helping to paint a rosy picture of their fringing on John Q Public’s right to privacy. CEO Eric Schmidt gave some wunderbar advice to anybody that is a little creeped out, maybe hesitant to the thought of a private company displaying to the world where they live:

[Y]ou can just move, right?

Well shit, I mean if it’s that easy. This is the same guy who, when asked if a person’s moronic behavior on social networking sites could haunt them in their later years, said you can just change your name to escape your days as a cyber-deviant. Some time later, after hearing how dumb that sounded, he told Steven Colbert he was joking. Hahaha, that was a joke right? Somebody needs to explain to ol’ Eric that the secret to TIMING! comedy is the

But anyway, back to the whole just moving thing. Sure, I can just move. I’m a kid (or at least I was 8 years ago…). I don’t have children of my own. My girlfriend and I can just throw our cats in some boxes and cart our crap to some other apartment at the end of our lease, and all the sexual predators and FBI raids will target our old residence (and any suckers that pick up our tab there). Problem solved. I wonder how that solution is going to fly for old folks, though. I mean, they get attached to stuff really easily. Like houses and all. Houses where their kids were born and raised. Families with children are kind of locked in too…moving isn’t that easy when you’re not the CEO of a company. I mean, sure, Eric was only given $1 for his salary in 2008-09. Until you realize that he’s a billionaire because of stock and stock options. See, cash…that’s the poor man’s money.

Maybe the man’s just a little too far removed from real life to grasp at what bothers us about Google. They gave us a simple search engine to search for our animated gifs involving cats working tech support, and without us paying attention it has been turned into a vast log of everything you’ve ever done on the internet. Ever. And that’s not the creepy part. You have no control over who looks that stuff up. Did you ever cheat on a crossword and accidentally find boobs? Congrats! They know about it.

We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.

Awesome. That, by the way, was another quote from Eric Schmidt. Maybe in 20 years when we’re living in a Google-owned Orwellian state, where there is no need for thought police because, shit, Google knows what we’re thinking about anyway, Eric will look back on that quote. As he sees the fires burning and the torches and pitchforks coming for him, he’ll remember he said that. And do you know what he’ll say then?

“Crap. If only the angry masses couldn’t have found where I live.”

You can’t take back something you did on the internet, Eric. But you can always change your name and move.

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