I'm concerned with our autonomy. I don't like the idea of people collecting information on me in general, but I particularly don't like it when it's used to sort of exploit your weaknesses or make you lose control in some ways.

The Internet, you know, 10 or 15 years ago sort of felt like the wild West. You could go out there and do anything and search for things, and, you know, find out about stuff. Now always in the back of my mind, you know, whether it's email or whatever else, it's like, well, is this going to show up somewhere? Is someone going to keep track of this and, you know, know I was searching for - maybe it's an embarrassing disease, maybe it's a weird hobby?

I think Google is the most successful attention merchant - profitable attention merchant in the history of the world, most successful advertising-only based company - most profitable. They started a very idealistic, beautiful company in many ways, but they didn't have a business model.

You know, it's so funny that the internet's become a series of traps where you do sort of innocent things like give your name or address or indicate a preference, I like this thing, and then therefore you open yourself up to a deluge of advertising based on those stated preferences.

I'm concerned with our autonomy. I don't like the idea of people collecting information on me in general, but I particularly don't like it when it's used to sort of exploit your weaknesses or make you lose control in some ways.

Nothing, save the hangman's noose, concentrates the mind like piles of cash.

The breakup of Bell laid the foundation for every important communications revolution since the 1980s onward. There was no way of knowing that thirty years on we would have an Internet, handheld computers, and social networking, but it is hard to imagine their coming when they did, had the company that bured the answering machine remained intact.