Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Talks Google, Facebook And More; Google's Eric Schmidt Says Assange Is 'Paranoid'

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appeared as a hologram in a live interview at the Nantucket Project's Art + Commerce Summit and talked about Google, Facebook and more.

After living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for two years, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange graced an event, albeit not in person.

In his interview, he spoke about his thoughts about Google, which he had been very vocal about in the past.

"Google is not a 'playroom of idea' as it wants to portray itself," Assange said. "And it's not a 'different kind of company.' It's a normal company. Unlike normal companies it is engaged in a very ambitious project that is not normal ... to gather as much info as possible on people, store it, index it and use it to sell advertising. And it's very easy for the [National Security Agency] to get its fangs into that."

All these statements had been answered by Google's Eric Schmidt by saying that Assange was being "paranoid" about security.

In a statement on Tuesday, Schmidt said "The fact of the matter is Julian is very paranoid about things and it's true that the NSA did things they shouldn't have done, but Google has done none of those things. Google never collaborated with NSA and in fact, we've fought very hard against what they did and since what the NSA did which we do not like, we have taken all of our data, all of our exchanges, and we fully encrypted them so no one can get them, especially the government."

Meanwhile, it wasn't only Google that received the flak from Assange. He also said, "Everytime you go to a party and take a picture and post that picture to Facebook, you're being a rat. You're being a narc."

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was taken in by Ecuador's foreign minister and was given asylum in London in 2012 to avoid extradition charges.

Tags
Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange
WikiLeaks
Join the Discussion

Latest Photo Gallery

Real Time Analytics