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Mozilla Exec Urges Switch From Google To Bing
Andorin writes "Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, has published a brief blog post in which he recommends that Firefox users move from using Google as their main search engine to Bing, citing privacy issues. Disregarding the existence of alternative search engines such as Ask and Yahoo, Dotzler asserts that Bing's privacy policy is better than Google's. Dotzler explains the recommendation with a quote from Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google: '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...' Ars Technica also covers the story."
The generation growing up today (the facebook generation) will have no concerns for privacy. They'll laugh at your paranoid concerns about privacy. It will be a better world where people are not scared of this new fangled idea of letting others access your information.
Whoa, that page has some crazy background. Reminds me of something out of the 1990s.
Anyway, before all the conspiracy theorist posts pop up, this looks like it's just a post on his personal blog, which includes posts about his beard and other random things. Even if Mozilla was officially endorsing and getting paid for Bing searches, Google already has the same deal so there's no issue there.
Of course, this could just be a member of the Mozilla community jumping at the first chance to get back at Google for making Chrome... hmm...
A point the article makes is that Microsoft, as a corporation that has dealt heavily with many things outside of just search, is very much grounded in privacy concerns and legal matters related to it. They are likely to uphold their privacy policy very strictly on their internet services.
When I saw that "funny" mockup of Google and the phrase "where are my fucking keys" - and google returns "on the fridge, where you left them dipshit" - I honestly thought this is where it is headed.
Google has made no secret of wanting to control the entire Internet experience for a user from content down to how you access that content. They have both sides of the market cornered, from a user and a webmaster's perspective.
They control most of the advertising, and they control (directly through analytics, or indirectly through adsense tracking) your website statistics. They know where a user goes to, and from, they know which sites. They know what you search for. If you've actually read the adsense terms, you'll know they tell you they use all the information they have on you to target advertisements...ON ANY SITE.
If you search for "buy a cadillac" and you then go to another website, if the cadillac ads are permitted to run on that site, it is likely you'll see them, or other ads Google has specifically targeted to you. It is no longer the job of the webmaster to do this.
I like Google, but the amount of information they have, if they DID decide to be evil, they would be the WORST company, because Microsoft holds absolutely nothing compared to what Google has on you.
Two things to consider:
1 - When Bush stated publicly that the federal government should have all search data tied to IP addresses, AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft handed it over without any official government mandate or court order. They just volunteered your private information. Google refused.
2 - At the same time several of these issues were coming to a head at once (Bush's statement, Yahoo turning in a Chinese blogger, Google being forced by Brazil to give out details on a child pornography ring on Orkut) Google announced they were changing their policies and anonymizing logs sooner to protect people's privacy. They said their new anonymization policy was better than anyone else out there. I haven't read them all, so I can't say for certain.
So one company has shown they will fight to protect your privacy until they are absolutely forced (Google didn't even hand information over to Brazil when a judge ordered them to do so initially), and they anonymize their logs sooner.
So why in the world is Bing better for privacy?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.