Mozilla exec recommends Bing for search
Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development watched Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt talk about privacy concerns in a CNBC interview, and was compelled to respond with recommending Microsoft’s Bing as the search engine of choice for Mozilla’s Firefox. This is what Schmidt said…
“I think judgment matters… If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.” [from CNBC – Youtube link]
The ‘well don’t do anything bad and you have nothing to worry about’ is one of the weakest responses to privacy concerns, as you don’t have to do anything ‘bad’ to have your life disrupted by poor privacy policies. There’s a reason that privacy matters. Here’s Asa’s response:
“I think that the thing that bothers me most about Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s comment is that it makes clear that he simply doesn’t understand privacy. That a company with so much user data on its servers is led by someone who just doesn’t understand privacy is really scary to me and it should be scary to you as well.” [from his blog]
Personally, I’d have to agree with Dotzler. Although some of the responses on his site conflate the search engine wars with the browser wars, the issue is neither. It’s about controlling one’s privacy. Hell, even Facebook gets it. Google’s official corporate motto may be “Don’t Be Evil”, but sometimes I wonder what their definition of ‘evil’ is. It will also be interesting to see how this affects the relationship between Google and Mozilla, as the latter has reaped some rewards from the former’s adsense offering on the home page.
I wonder how much of these privacy concerns are valid.
I mean, i chose to have google use my personal information to optimize my searches. I want it to remember my preferences. Not that the information is publicly available, but I don’t care if the world knows i look at porn all the time, so what if i searched for “mexican goat show” once (I was curious!).
I want google (or bing) to remember that when i search for “trans am” i am interested in the band, not the car. When I look at the sites i like to look at, if it can recommend me stuff i actually may be interested in based on these sites, all the better.
More so, are there any known cases of google (or any search engine) somehow screwing up someones life (to any degree) over their privacy concerns?
I’d say that the validity of privacy concerns is in large part dependent on how much one values one’s own privacy. You may not want people to know about your goat searches, but someone else might be, well, more private.
The corporate privacy policy also plays a factor, and I lean towards Asa Dotzler’s POV on this one. If the head of Google is saying “privacy schmivacy”, it’s a bit disconcerting. Also, to be fair, switching to Bing isn’t Mozilla’s policy, just Dotzler’s opinion.
As for privacy issues affecting people’s lives, there are some occasions in the past that have come up (usually in the “we googled your name and were surprised what you allowed online” vein), though this seems more frequent on Facebook than any search engine. I’m sure I’ve read other examples, but don’t recall them at the moment.
I think from a corporate privacy policy POV there is only one “if a government asks for it, they will get it”.
This doesn’t currently bother me as a canadian, but I recall last year (yr before?) china asking the 3 big US search engines to hand over all info on a blogger, ms and yahoo did pretty quickly, google raised a bit of a stink but ended up having to cave. I think that blogger is now in jail.
My point being, no matter what is stored, governments can get it, and many governments make it a law that you keep certain types of information (patriot act). Corporate policy really doesn’t matter after that
Of course, as Canadians, we don’t have much to complain about, since it appears our gov’t takes our privacy seriously enough that Facebook’s latest global privacy changes were (probably at least in part) driven by the Privacy Commissioners rulings.
I’d say the question is less about gov’t invasiveness than it is about the attitude re: privacy that the CEO has. Certainly has me LESS interested in an Android phone now, or the Chrome OS. Not really keen on having to have a connection to the internet to run an operating system on my phone or laptop, just on general principle. 🙂