Google, the Internet company, has often faced accusations of acting like Big Brother. Eric Schmidt, the company's CEO, is not helping in terms of changing people's perceptions. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Schmidt decided to issue a frightening warning. Schmidt says that to avoid the potentially reputation-tarnishing search records that his company keeps, perhaps people should change their names when they reach adulthood.

"'I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he said. In the Wall Street Journal report, Schmidt predicts that every young person one day would be given the option to automatically change names upon reaching adulthood in order to disown embarrassing information from their youth stored on their friends' social media sites.

This isn't the first time Schmidt has made such predictions about Internet behavior. In an interview with CNBC last year, he said that "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

Schmidt's comments are seemingly in direct contradiction to his company's motto: "Don't be evil." Schmidt has also made statements in the past regarding how posting excessive personal information on social networking sites can destroy a person's job prospects in the future. It is possible that Schmidt was joking and the Wall Street Journal failed to pick up on it. If he indeed was joking, or even if he meant it half-heatedly, such comments can motivate paranoid users to change their security settings.

The company has been getting a steady stream of bad publicity lately. Most notable of which is its stand on net neutrality with Verizon. Both companies have voiced their support for new Web standards that would charge users premium rates for access to content such as critical health care services and online gaming platforms. Critics have attacked the companies' stance, saying that such a system would be highly damaging and have described the proposal as "worse than feared." A case in Switzerland has also surfaced that accuses Google of surreptitiously stealing personal information from users over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks.

Google stores information about search habits for nine months. This is in comparison to Bing's retention period of six months and Yahoo's three months. When the nine months is up, Google makes this trend data anonymous. It does not take out the entire IP address. Google removes the IP address' last octet, "which means there are 254 possibilities for the IP address in question (.0 and .255 are reserved addresses)." Competitors are doing it differently, Bing takes out the whole IP address. Yahoo, on the other hand, deletes everything, according to Ars Technica.

The issues are starting to pile up. There have also been privacy complaints regarding Google Social Search. The company recently changed how it indexed Gmail messages to address user concerns over transcribed Google Voice e-mail messages being displayed in the search engine.Google's Dashboard has likewise raised concerns and even the new Chrome OS has been the topic of scrutiny over privacy.

While some may consider Schmidt's advice to change your name as scary, not everyone is in disagreement with the Google CEO . Marshall Kirkpatrick, a writer for technology blog ReadWriteWeb, says, "Perhaps it's a good idea, even. But it's probably far more a fantasy scenario to chew on than anything tied to reality. It demonstrates an unusual understanding of privacy, freedom, indiscretion and consequences: as tied to the line between youth and adulthood more than the basic human experience.

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch likewise sees reason in the Schmidt's suggestion: "Schmidt may be envisioning a centralized system where such critical background information is available to employers without their needing an applicant's full name, which could make a name change worthwhile. Fair enough."