On Google's famous "Don't Be Evil" rule: "When I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there's no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something."
On competition: "Our business strategy is not to compete."
Alex Wong / Getty Images
On what Google can do: “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market … and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”
On Google's staggering collection of personal info: "Would you prefer someone else? Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?"
On Google searches: "I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next."
On what people want: “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. … Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”
On the future 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."
On the Android operating system: "Not secure? It's more secure than the iPhone."
Scott Olson / Getty Images
Source.
On being creepy: "Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it."
On uses for Google Glass: "There's obviously issues, shall we say, of appropriateness of how people are going to use these things. There's a right time to have Google Glass on, and there's a right time to have it off, if you take my drift."
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images
On the NSA: "There's been spying for years, there's been surveillance for years, and so forth, I'm not going to pass judgement on that, it's the nature of our society."
Joe Raedle / Getty Images
On the global warming "fact problem": "The media gets confused because they don't believe in facts, and public policy people get confused because they don't believe in innovation."
Jillian was most recently an enterprise technology editor based in San Francisco. She started at Insider as an intern on the technology desk in 2013 and rose to a senior reporter position, covering Alphabet, Facebook, and ecommerce. After three years at the site, she left to spend time freelance writing abroad, before taking reporting positions at CNBC and then at Forbes, where she covered Alphabet, Silicon Valley culture, and artificial intelligence. She returned to Insider in March 2020 and worked on the enterprise technology desk until August 2021. Jillian graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in magazine journalism and information management and technology.
