'Change name to disown misspent youth'

WASHINGTON, USA: Google chief executive officer (CEO) Eric Schmidt has suggested to the young generation to change their names when they reach adulthood to disown their misspent youth.

"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he told the Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.

He predicted, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends' social media sites and to escape their digital past.

"I mean we really have to think about these things as a society," he added.

"We're trying to figure out what the future of search is," Schmidt acknowledged. "I mean that in a positive way. We're still happy to be in search, believe me. But one idea is that 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," he said. "They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."

A generation of powerful handheld devices is just around the corner that will be adept at surprising you with information that you didn't know you wanted to know, said Schmidt.

"The thing that makes newspapers so fundamentally fascinating —  that serendipity — can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically," he said.

Schmidt is a believer in targeted advertising because, simply, he's a believer in targeted everything.

"The power of individual targeting — the technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them," the report quoted him as having said.