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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.
Choices, choices.... Do I hand over the care for my personal privacy to Beelzebub or Ba'al?
The Long Now Foundation
A full comparison of alternate search engines instead of recommending just Bing would have been a better statement. He could have lined up Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, etc and compared privacy policies side by side for the people he's speaking too.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Idk, do you really expect any internet service to hold to their stated privacy policy? Yes, they may, or when the feds come a knockin', they might have not and the logs are chock full of stuff. Without a paying customer relationship, it's my understanding that it's pretty hard to have any enforceable reconcilation if they breach their word.
Considering that most browsers have a search bar, it would be nice if the browser could somehow implement anonymizing techniques independent of the specific search engine. Hell, charge money for it as a value-added service to route the search requests through their anonymizing server, which they promise not to log, for the paranoid user. I'd feel a lot better doing that than using some dubious Tor node.
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...
I actually applaud Firefox for this change.
What change? They didn't change anything.
Marketing companies shouldn't just fuck everyone in the ass for their own gain.
You know Microsoft's privacy policy isn't all that better. They still associate your search with your name and ip address for 18 months after you searched. 'Fuck everyone in the ass for their own gain' is a bit of a hyperbole, wouldn't you say?
Switch from Google to MS, because of PRIVACY issues?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Anyone who thinks, for even a second, that Microsoft will respect your privacy _more_ than Google is a fool. I'm fine with anyone having an issue with Google's policy's regarding personal data but for anyone to think that Microsoft will be better is simply laughable.
Dear customers. We noticed that it's not healthy to eat heavy doses of arsenic. Please switch to hydrogen cyanide.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Clusty is by far the best search engine. I don't understand why more people are not using it.
Fixed.
Ice Cream has no bones.
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.
Sounds like fear of Chrome
I seriously had to stop and read this twice. Apparently hell froze over.
Like Mozilla switching to Bing will ever end well. I can see Ballmer on the edge of the chair (he was about to throw), trying to keep a poker face and not burst out in evil laughter.
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
Given how absurdly permissive their stated privacy policies usually are, they had damn well better hold to it.
I mean, it's a company. If they want to claim that there's some sort of legally binding contract that shows up just because I viewed their website, at the bare minimum they ought to be fulfilling their obligations. Does that mean they will? In many cases no, but those sites are guilty of a breach of contract, by a contract they unilaterally imposed.
Hell, charge money for it as a value-added service to route the search requests through their anonymizing server, which they promise not to log, for the paranoid user. I'd feel a lot better doing that than using some dubious Tor node.
The problem with a pay-based anonymizing server is that they have to get money from you somehow. That alone leaves a bit-trail which can be traced by the government, and in many countries the governments are actually mandating that commercial service providers keep logs. So, for the truly paranoid, I don't see how a fee-based anonymizer is superior to Tor. With Tor, if you're willing to use multiple nodes (and accept the resulting huge performance hit) then it seems to me you get better security than using a single commercial anonymizer.
It surprises me that when there are discussions about search engine privacy, Cuil never seems to be mentioned. Or at least I do not see it.
On Cuil's privacy page it says:
"When you search with Cuil, we do not keep any personally identifiable information, period. Your search history is your business."
So is there some reason Cuil is not brought up more? Maybe there are resons not to use it that I do not know about. Or perhaps it is just not well known.
i'd be glad to make a switch, but there are some problems i have with bing:
Somehow looking at bing gives me the same feeling as looking at a typical domain-squatting site.
Why can't they just get it right?
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Yes, I'm sure Google's traffic will nose dive immediately and they'll mend their ways once me(*) and thee switch to Bing.
* Disclaimer: me and thee excludes me.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Bitter Executive is bitter about Chrome.
Anyone who worries about privacy on the Internet shouldn't be on the Internet. I admire Schmidt for his honesty. I worry more about those who talk about keeping privacy while at the same time profit from it.
Every feature you hate somehow leaks your personal data to Google if you aren't careful. Interesting co-incidence eh?
Also does Adobe and Apple really need couple of cents from Google? Adobe Flash which has way bigger market share than Google comes with toolbar option selected by DEFAULT. You know the deal with impossible to change Google search on Safari/OS X.
Marketing companies shouldn't just fuck everyone in the ass for their own gain.
Isn't that their job?
Free Martian Whores!
If someone like Asa suggests using a Microsoft technology because your company currently looks more evil than "satan himself" (remember?), you should look to mirror and ask what is wrong.
Two items. One, Schmidt's quote was taken out of context. He was referring to "do"-ing a search something you'd rather not be known, because ALL the search engines keep records and ALL of them are subject to subpoena.
Two, "Firefox" isn't making a change - this is one person expressing an opinion. If the organization was that concerned, they'd drop Google as the default browser.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
i'm sorry but what the hell are you searching for that gives you viagra and porn?
Sure, theres that search everyone does once in a great while where they go "oops, definitely shouldn't have googled that", (my recent one was the audio/video app "g-spot")
but for the other 99% of the time the results are incredibly relevant. other spam sure, (like when i search for an electronic component and just get tons of keyword hits at greymarket sites), but viagra/porn?
Schmidt was warning users about the risks inherit in using ANY search engine "including Google" and that governments can access data kept by search engines in the future. Dotzler's reaction is truly cringe worthy.
He then goes on to say "There is no ambiguity, no "out of context" here." right after COMPLETELY taking the quote out of context. This is ugly.
No, Google does and always has taken user privacy seriously. But the fact is, and Schmidt is being quite frank, here, they don't have the right to deny requests from law enforcement agencies, and as long as that's true, no company will fail to communicate everything you've ever done to the feds whenever they want to know about it.
Look at it this way: would you expect Balmer to point out that giving Microsoft any information about you would ultimately lead to it being in the hands of the Federal government? No, of course not. Microsoft will quite happily hide that fact from you and make you feel more secure. Google will warn you about it up-front, but they ALREADY LOST THAT CASE IN COURT (yep, Google tried to refuse to hand over search histories).
So, you get to ask yourself: who do you want to do business with: the company that warns you about risks to your privacy so that you can moderate your behavior accordingly or the company that tells you that everything is just fine. Schmidt made me uncomfortable, and that's a good thing.
Remember the days when Microsoft was "evil" and Google everyone's darling?
;-)
Then Bill Gates contributed $40bn to the world in history's single biggest act of charity, Microsoft's domination looked for a while like it really was slipping, and Google simply became too big.
Google has simply become everybody's competitor.
Example: the Chrome browser competes directly with Mozilla's Firefox. Not that this was the reason for that blog post, of course
Another example: Google is so big that its people don't talk to each other, to the extent that they are building two incompatible operating systems (Android and Chrome OS).
Another example: the publishing industry has set its sights on Google, for the crime of taking away too much of their Ad revenue. They are contemplating de-indexing Google.
So Microsoft, once the "evil empire", is now champion of Liberty. Well, that is good; because they never were that evil, so some redress is in order.
And Bill Gates did contribute $40bn to the world. When Sergei Brin, Larry page and Eric Schmidt do the same with their personal fortunes, we can all go back to normal.
Bottom line: businesses are for-profit affairs. The best restraint on them is competition. We the people should keep Microsoft and Google both on their toes, for our own best interest.
And we should remember that people like Gates, Brin, Schmidt & Page are good good people at heart. They are creative. They contribute. Just like everyone, we need to set them straight from time to time.
You mean when Microsoft rolled over and handed out private information when the Feds came knocking....
Google's CEO was point out that simple fact that when the government wants information, NO ONE is going to deny them. So your best course of action is not to engage in activities that can get you into trouble because businesses are not going to protect you.
twit!
No, marketing's job is to make you want it.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
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.
There are only two problems there.
1. Exactly who is "your generation"? You make it sound like it's some uniform Borg collective, where everyone does the same things and realizes the same things. In reality, for every suburban white kid who grew with Facebook and with doing this or that thing, there'll be at least two who grew with fundamentally different experiences. The guy judging you may not be the guy who grew up with porn, college toga parties, and SW like you did, but some guy who grew up sleeping with his arms crossed out of fear that otherwise he might touch himself accidentally at night and JESUS SEES HIM. And who thinks that SW is the work of the devil because it teaches people a different religion. (As opposed to, of course, those of us who think only the prequels and the wookies are the work of the devil because they ruin the whole setup and moral underpinnings of the original trilogy;)
2. Don't underestimate hypocrisy and group-think. People who grew up doing X, and even people who do X every night, might want to see you hanged, drawn and quartered for doing X too.
Preachers who watch gay porn at night (or in a few cases even got caught actually having gay sex), didn't go, "meh, I did it too, and it doesn't affect my work." They then went to the pullpit and preached that gays are an abomination, and the Lord sent us aids as punishment.
Communities who buy far kinkier porn, asked that some porn producer or sex shop owner be jailed for it. They didn't go, "meh, I watch worse stuff at home and it hasn't affected my work or relationships yet", they went more like, "OMG, lock him up for spreading that sin and corruption."
People who did pot in college, and sometimes a long time after it too, push to have others drug tested and fired if they as much as ever were within a mile of someone smoking pot. Or push for tougher drug laws if they're politicians.
Basically the way people react to X has _very_ little to do with "I did X too and didn't affect me", and a lot more with "do I want to be seen as supporting X, or as the guy who's tough on X?" The same guy who might actually chug more beer in a week than you do in a month, may well fire you for appearing on Facebook or youtube drunk in a pool of your vomit once, because that's the company image he wants, and/or that's the kind of guy he wants to be seen as.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...and who listens to some exec when he says, "Use another company because I say so!" and doesn't think for themselves.
There are privacy concerns with Google. Understandable.
There are also privacy concerns with Bing.
Eric Schmidt's quote not only said, "perhaps you shouldn't be doing [bad things]" but also "privacy with search engines in general [is a farce]." This is nothing new! People just want to warhgrhable over it so they have something to talk about during the day. There really is nothing all that new here. Do you think you're not already tracked around the internet in the first place? Thinking anything different would only be fooling yourself.
Don't you understand the concept of asymmetric encryption? I don't have to send my key via a secure channel. I can post my public key in this post for anyone to see.
Anyone who wants to send me a message, will encrypt it with my publicly available key and it will only be possible to decrypt it using my private key. That's the "magic" my web-browser/email software/etc has that the hacker's programs don't have.
Dilbert RSS feed
I find that Bing falls for marketing scams and SEO much worse than Firefox. Random download sites and outright scams show up in Bing first with lots of searches, while Google is much more successful at ignoring marketingese and just giving you the site you want.
For example, searching for Wii homebrew gives:
Google:
Bing:
So basically, people looking for Wii homebrew and using Bing are at a much higher chance of getting scammed. Seriously, Wiibrew isn't even in the first page of results.
Going the other way, searching for the name of the scam (homebreware) yields (antiscam = site that explains that homebreware is a scam): ...
Google: antiscam, antiscam, antiscam, scam, scam, antiscam, scam,
Bing: scam, scam, scam, scam, scam, scam, scam...
Someone using Bing and doublechecking on what they're about to buy isn't going to remotely realize they're being scammed.
If they had an agreement with Microsoft . Which they don't. Which you'd know if you'd read the article. Which you didn't. Busted, punk.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Stop giving facts, no one cares about them.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Companies like Google may be legally required to retain logging data. It may not be by their own choice alone that they do it.
But I'm also sure the company will also try to squeeze any advantage they can get out of the data for themselves. In this regard, I find Schmidt's apparent lack of respect for users' privacy rather concerning. It may be that everyone knows governments will have access to the data, and that in that sense you perhaps shouldn't do (without some kind of external anonymization) what you don't want them to know, but Schmidt's statement also suggests that Google itself will be willing to do just about anything they can with your data (within the boundaries of law), and particularly that he thinks it's normal and acceptable for everybody else as well to gather all the data about you that they want and retain it for any purposes they see fit.
Google of course uses the data also to its users' benefit to some extent (improving search results), but certainly not all companies in all fields do. Think about insurance companies, for instance, where the benefit of the company and the customer are much more clearly at odds with each other (the optimal point where the customer pays the most and receives the least is pretty much just probability and statistics, and the companies use all available information to determine that optimal setting). Will Google eventually come to cooperate with them? "Oh, but you searched for this and that... it puts you in a risk group for foobar, so we can't give you anything."
Yes, I know that kind of thing is probably illegal. However, laws do change and when the data is out there and there's clearly the willingness to use it for anything (and the companies don't seem to need to worry that customers will leave them because of it), it almost becomes a matter of lobbying. And that's just an example -- the dynamics with that kind of a mineable mass of data are something that we can't even predict in the long run. We don't know who's going to want to use it and for what.
That makers the lack of respect for privacy more disturbing than stating the fact that the government is likely to get their hands on data if they want to.
Possible fraud? Be VERY careful about such statements from anyone connected with the Mozilla Foundation. The foundation has been getting more than $68,000,000 each year to make Google the default search engine in Firefox. See this article, for example: Google Deal Produces 91% of Mozilla's Revenue.
Google has said it will stop paying that money, eventually. Or maybe Microsoft has offered more. Any statements from anyone at Mozilla about search engines must be considered to be possibly about money.
Eric Schmidt's choice of words showed an amazing lack of social awareness. However, remember that he also has a point. The U.S. government has decided it can force executives to give information, and can also force them to keep silent about giving that information. The U.S. government calling the law the "Patriot Act" was an attempt to intimidate by implying that someone who is against the complete loss of privacy in the U.S. is not a patriot. That's not correct, of course.
Maybe the underlying point of Mr. Schmidt's statement was that the U.S. government has been forcing Google to help conduct surveillance, and he feels uncomfortable about that. However, it was a foolish choice of words.