John McAfee publicly called for Google to change its “ways” or risk having its network of web crawlers disabled, adding that the Mountain View, California-based tech giant is “endangering our humanity” due to what he believes is a lack of respect for user privacy. In a video depicting his interview with RT that he recently published on YouTube, the eccentric business magnate said that Google was founded on good ideas but grew too large for its own good, consequently becoming a soulless corporation that doesn’t care about people due to its own “greed.” The millionaire’s accusations quickly turned into declarations, with McAfee promising that he’s currently developing what he refers to as the “Sentinel,” a highly advanced technology meant to somehow disable Google’s web crawlers on which the Alphabet-owned company is heavily reliant to accumulate data and index new pages for its search engine. It’s currently unclear how exactly is the Sentinel meant to accomplish that but McAfee promised that the solution will be ready for consumer use within the next five years. The founder of the established antivirus company said he’s primarily worried about the way in which Google handles user privacy, stating how he’ll do whatever he can to stop that practice.
McAfee himself is an eccentric figure in the tech industry who’s been working in the Silicon Valley since the ’70s and left the antivirus company he founded in the mid-’90s, selling his entire stake in the business in 1996. Yet it wasn’t until 15 years later that he regularly started making headlines in the mainstream media, initially due to the fact that he fled from his residence in Belize following one local murder investigation in which authorities considered him a person of interest. His sporadic public persona mostly moved to social media following that episode and his return to the United States, with McAfee ridiculing everything from domestic policy to the McAfee Antivirus software he helped create, as well as providing insight on a number of topical issues, including user privacy. Two years ago, he tried to become the presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party in the 2016 presidential election, though he lost that nomination to New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson.
Last year, McAfee was appointed as the Chief Executive Officer of MGT, a firm with a rather diversified portfolio that initially invested in mobile games but lately turned to cyber security, having just announced what its recently appointed CEO claims is the most secure phone in the world. A number of industry watchers previously speculated that McAfee’s outspoken and eccentric public persona is just a front and a method for him to draw attention to his latest ventures, an argument that may be strengthened by the fact that the aforementioned Sentinel is being developed by MGT.