They went ‘too far’: Former Google CEO says Facebook revelations are ‘disturbing’

During a Bloomberg Television interview, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that recent whistleblower reports and leaked documents about Facebook's internal workings are "pretty concerning."

According to Schmidt, Facebook "went a little too far on the revenue side and not enough on the judgment side."

"You can see that from the Facebook leaks that have been occurring," he added.

"The disturbing thing is that people have said a long time ago that Facebook was doing this, but people said, 'Well, they didn't understand or they didn't measure it'," Schmidt said. "And what we learnt in those disclosures is that these companies — and Facebook in particular — knew what it was doing."

But he says regulating the company is not the answer.

"The regulation is always either too soon or too late," said Schmidt, who was CEO and chair of Google from 2001 to 2011 and executive chair of the company until 2018. "What I would rather have is sort of proper industrial restraint."

Schmidt is the co-author of a new book called "The Age of AI," that examines how artificial intelligence is affecting human society.