“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

The if you’re not doing anything wrong meme rears it’s ugly head once again, only this time it’s the CEO of a company who’s business relies on the accumulation of data (albeit not all of it is personal). Last time I heard the line it was coming out of a Houston police chief’s mouth, while trying to justify the installation of surveillance cameras in people’s bedrooms.

Taking into consideration the rumors of Mr. Schmidt’s open marriage, why does this all seem so ironic?

UPDATE: Bruce Scheier reacts.

Control Your Info (CYI), a group that exists to “draw attention to questions concerning online privacy awareness,” performed a few Google searches and discovered several Facebook groups without administrators. Thanks to the nature of the Facebook group system itself, if there is no administrator present, anyone can join and make themselves an administrator. This is what CYI did. They used the Google search, and with the results, managed to make themselves administrators on 289 open groups.

This is not hacking, and the people who do it are not hackers in the criminal sense, or the ethical sense for that matter.

Thank you Mr. Ragan.

The work necessary to protect your online privacy is up to you.

Parental discretion advised.

(h/t E. Sizemore)

Say what you like about healthcare reform—say that it is necessary, or it is unnecessary; say that it is just another government program bound to fail, or that it is an important government duty to pick up where the private sector has failed; say that it is a manufactured crisis or that it is the most serious political issue of our time—but you can’t say this bill is rational, well-considered, and logical.

Read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic notes health insurers aren’t too happy about what’s going on (not surprising), and somewhat confirms Matthew’s previous mention of big hospitals and pharma getting the gravy.

Insurers declaring war? Looking at my own premium statements, I assumed they’d already started firing.

Have you ever seen a business plan with hockey stick revenue projections? It’s common for VCs to receive business plans showing sales growing from $0 to $100m in the first 5 years of a company’s life.

In fact, growth conversations between VCs and management teams often cause angst. One of the reasons is that people from both groups tend to have unsubstantiated beliefs about how long it takes to build an important company.

Check out the data – less that a third of top 100 publicly traded software companies hit $50 million in sales in six years or less. Has the sector become nearsighted?

(h/t Paul Kedrosky)

Finance

Fly Fishing

Give yourself a break, will ya’?

Adieu.

Fly Fishing

Technology

Finance

MG signing off (not really)

*Editor’s note: we’re now actively filtering out all news related to Twitter and Facebook for efficiency’s sake – the above mentioned groundbreaking highlights were garnered through inference.

Finance

Fly Fishing

MG signing off (to clean out the rest)

Finance

Fly Fishing

Adieu.

One of the advantages of using encrypted email, is that your message won’t trip some piece of mindless data mining software. Remember, a few years ago, when the FBI was running around investigating an Elementary School Teacher because profiling software picked her as a potential terrorist?

Well, using encryption may not be enough.

An alias might be useful in our increasingly social web.