Privacy has been a growing concern for many people in the technology industry, with major companies like Apple and Google going head to head with government agencies regarding what sort of information can and cannot be shared from their users. Organizations like the FBI and NSA have been pushing for tech companies to intentionally leave security backdoors in their platforms to allow government access to private information, something many of these companies, including Google, are resisting.

Former Google CEO and current Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt recently spoke about Google’s stance on privacy and encryption in an interview by Charlie Rose at The Economic Club of New York.

“The industry is united in saying that government forcing us to weaken encryption is a bad idea,” Schmidt said (via TechCrunch). “If we are forced by law to weaken encryption, it won’t just be government that has access to information on your phone, it will also be the bad guys.”

“We’ve taken the position there need to be other solutions rather than forcing a weakening or a back door.”

Schmidt appears confident in Google’s ability to keep user information private, and he claimed that “if you want something you want to keep private, the best place to keep it is in Gmail.”

Of course, there have been concerns over the way Google itself handles user privacy, both with Gmail and with its other services. Most notably, Gmail’s ad snippets use data gathered from the content of user emails to display personalized advertisements. Users have the choice of turning this feature off, but it is enabled by default.

The privacy policy for Gmail ads also notes that “even if you opt-out, Google will still scan and filter your email with our automated processing.” Users are meant to feel at ease because their data is only being looked at by a machine, but considering Google’s continued advances in artificial intelligence research, that may not be reassuring for much longer.

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