Larry Page is Google’s CEO and Sundar Pichai is Google’s Senior VP, Android and Chrome.

An interview with the top players in any major company is going to be interesting, but I thought this interview lacked vision. Worth reading, but there was far more breadth than depth.

One exchange that stood out for me, this discussion on privacy:

Q: Do you worry that the more devices we have that are connected to Google, there’s not just a privacy question but also something like creepiness?

Page: I think that the Internet and mobile devices in general is changing people’s lives a lot. And we’re feeling that. Everyone can tell that their lives are going to be affected, but we don’t quite know how yet, because we’re not using these things — and because of that there’s a lot of uncertainty. I think we’ll figure that out and we’ll get products, services and technologies that really benefit people a lot, and that make their lives significantly better. And as we do that people will understand those — and then there’ll be the next set of things.

Q: You’re saying the usefulness of the products will change how people feel about them?

Page: Yeah, and we know that if we talk about things before people see them, there’s a much more negative reaction. That’s one of the things we learned. It’s really important for people to be able to experience products; otherwise you fear the worst without seeing those benefits.

I’m not trying to minimize the issues. For me, I’m so excited about the possibilities to improve things for people, my worry would be the opposite. We get so worried about these things that we don’t get the benefits. I think that’s what’s happened in health care. We’ve decided, through regulation largely, that data is so locked up that it can’t be used to benefit people very well.

Right now we don’t data-mine health care data. If we did we’d probably save 100,000 lives next year. I’m very worried that the media and governments will try to stoke the people’s fears and we’ll end up in a state where we could benefit a lot of people but we’re not able to do that. That’s the likely outcome.

There are also laws to consider, laws put in place to protect the privacy of medical records. There’s a certain amount of hubris in the claim that you’d save 100,000 lives next year if you could only data-mine health care data. I don’t like where that thinking is going.