# Eric Schmidt — "the creepy line" > [!quote] "There is what I call the creepy line. The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it." > — Eric Schmidt, The Atlantic's Washington Ideas Forum, October 1, 2010 ## Context [[Eric Schmidt]], then [[Google]] CEO, said this in conversation with The Atlantic's James Bennet at the Washington Ideas Forum. In the same period he described Google's reach in unusually candid terms: "We know where you are. We know where you've been. We can more or less know what you're thinking about." The "creepy line" framing was meant to reassure — Google would approach maximal surveillance but stop short — yet it conceded that an internal "creepy" threshold existed and that company policy was to ride right up against it. ## Why this matters The phrase has become shorthand for the entire [[Surveillance Capitalism]] bargain: a tacit admission that the data-collection business operates at the edge of what users would find unacceptable, with the boundary defined and policed by the company itself rather than by law or the user. Paired with his 2009 "nothing to hide" remark, it captures the worldview of the dominant consumer-internet company at the moment its data practices were being normalized — and reads very differently now that Schmidt has moved into defense and national-security AI. ## Verification - **Reporting:** [HuffPost (with video)](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/eric-schmidt-google-creepy_n_748915); [The Register, October 4, 2010](https://www.theregister.com/2010/10/04/google_ericisms/). - **Compilation:** [Wikiquote — Eric Schmidt](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt). - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed. ## Related quotes - [[Eric Schmidt - maybe you shouldnt be doing it]] — his 2009 "nothing to hide" remark.