The tech press has worked itself into a frenzy over recent comments from Eric Schmidt at the Barcelona Mobile World Congress. According to numerous sources, Schmidt told attendees that "[t]here was a lot of confusion when it came out on Tuesday, and people thought that somehow we were publishing their email addresses and private information, which was not true."

He is in fact correct.  We discussed this several days ago here at this blog when the privacy trope first reared it’s ugly head (and again the other day when EPIC decided to start filing asinine complaints over it).

Privacy controls exist, though for the unsavvy they may not be obvious.

You can almost visualize the daggers shooting from GigaOM’s Matt Ingram’s eyes when he icily retorts to Schmidt in his headline: “Dear Eric: The Proper Response Is “I’m Sorry.”  Gizmodo’s Brian Barrett is equally unreserved when he calls Schmidt’s lack of apology and veracity “complete and utter manure.”

Here’s the facts: if you take steps to make your privacy a priority in Google services, your information will remain private. If you engage in social behavior (which is inherently non-private), then your personal data is not in a lockbox.

Furthermore, privacy isn’t a 1 or a 0. There are millions of shades of grey between private and public. A neophyte can’t immediately understand, no matter how well it’s documented, how to rig a complex system to only expose the data that needs or wants to be exposed.

Worst of all, tech writers like Matt Ingram and the good folks at Gizmodo know this (as do, I suppose, the dozens of other tech bloggers who will pile on to this sentiment to garner page views), and are simply being populist here.

I’ll say it, even though it may not be popular or particularly endearing: Interested in privacy on Google? RTFM.