From a very good Fast Company article by Austin Carr which addresses Internet privacy issues via a recent conversation between Nouriel Roubini and Eric Schmidt:

“Though market competition (or regulation) may dispel some inappropriate corporate uses of personal data tracking, the likelihood is the more ways we interact with technology, the more data we’re likely to share–perhaps unknowingly.

Schmidt does not believe this to be the case. ‘Not everyone is going to track all your behavior,’ he stressed. ‘There is no central Borg tracking all of these things.’

Still, the former Google CEO did touch on some moral issues related to certain types of data collection. ‘In America, there is a sense of fairness, culturally true for all of us…if you have a teenage boy or girl who makes a mistake–does some sort of crime, goes to juvenile hall, is released–in our system, they can apply and have that expunged from their record. They can legally state that they were never convicted of anything. That seems like a reasonable thing,’ Schmidt said. ‘Today, that’s not possible because of the Internet…[and] that seems to violate our innate sense of fairness.’

‘This lack of a delete button on the Internet is in fact a significant issue,’ Schmidt said. ‘There are times when erasure [of data] is the right thing…and there are times when it is inappropriate. How do we decide? We have to have that debate now.'”