Mozilla Exec Urges Switch From Google To Bing 527
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."
Choices (Score:5, Insightful)
Not going to happen (Score:2, Insightful)
Better response would have been... (Score:5, Insightful)
Respecting Your Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
something shiny here (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like fear of Chrome
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:One word: LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Switch from Google to MS, because of PRIVACY issues?
I would like to point out, that Microsoft has come under horrendous fire because of their business practices and privacy and other things as you all know. Now because they realize that they are in fact losing (although slowly) market share to F/OSS because of these issues - the EU has been really hammering Microsoft, MS has been becoming more sensitive to the privacy issue. It seems like whenever I do anything with a MS product these days message boxes pop up stating what data and where they are sending it and whether I would like to opt out, decrease certain parts of the data, or just send it all. Why even with my Visual Studio Beta 2, there were all these statements regarding what they'll be collecting.
What I'm saying is, when it come to my privacy, I'd trust Microsoft before Google - but that's as far as I trust any organization.
I would also like to point out that while all of you are fretting about your searching habits and what porn site you guys re visiting may be tracked by Google or whoever, the credit bureaus and your bank is sending your: SSN, dob, name, address, past addresses, spouse's name, mother's maiden name and other very sensitive information all over the World. I had an issue with a credit report and I settled it with a very nice woman in India - I think - her accent was muddled. She refused to give me her location because of "security reasons". That was Trans Union. Banks offshore quite a bit of their back office processing.
MS and Google are far far off of my radar as far as privacy issues and for "evil" business practices.
Re:Privacy fears (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome extensions? (Score:2, Insightful)
This coming in the same week as Google's Chrome launches extensions? No surprise. There's going to be an exodus of users from FF to Chrome I'm afraid.
Make privacy easy (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Respecting Your Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Bitter (Score:5, Insightful)
Yahoo doesn't do their own searches (Score:2, Insightful)
Schmidt is just being honest (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Toolbar the official spyware from good guys. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Marketing companies shouldn't just fuck everyone in the ass for their own gain.
Isn't that their job?
Re:Better response would have been... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a wake up call for Google (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Google (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:something shiny here (Score:5, Insightful)
IRS privacy policy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Lousy reference, there. The IRS takes privacy more seriously than just about anybody. [irs.gov]
After Richard Nixon misused the agency, Congress slapped the IRS with certain restrictions. To de-politicize the agency, the executive structure was purged of political appointees. All other agencies have a myriad (literally dozens, even at small agencies) of political appointees floating around whose jobs they got because they kissed some politicians ass. The IRS has only two.
There is a "Taxpayer Advocate" office that watches over the agency and is quite effective in getting the word out to Congress and the public when the agency starts being in the least bit abusive. There's a Privacy Office. There's extensive yearly training in on privacy matters. Beyond that, a privacy breach at the IRS gets you hauled away in handcuffs by officers of the Treasury Inspector Generals Office. The union for IRS workers, in fact, complains loud and long that employees are too closely monitored, sometimes being investigated, for example, for unauthorized disclosure of information just because the customer they helped happened to live near them.
If the guy got a bribe, he can report it to the IRS without the slightest worry.
Re:Google (Score:2, Insightful)
ONE person on the Firefox team made a blog entry. Hardly a major policy statement from Mozilla.
On the issue of google tracking. If you're not logged in, they track you via a cookie. I set Firefox not to keep cookies from google. End of story. Privacy issues averted. I'll continue using google as a search engine, because Bing just really doesn't do as wholistic or as good a job. Full stop.
Re:Privacy fears (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatively we come to a more honest world where everyone realises that pretty much everyone looks at porn.
And if he tries to pull that on you in the interview you whip out your phone and google him and fine he's a fan of MILFs and you then both compare favourite websites. You then look up who else he has looked up and find that they had far more dodgy tastes than you do and use this to your advantage in the salary negotiation phase of the interview.
Power and knowledge are only scary when the few have them, as soon as everyone has them then that's a lot less worrysome...
Re:Bing (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Way to miss the point Dotzler (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:problems with bing (Score:1, Insightful)
seriously that's it! it makes me feel like its a domain-squatting site and all my search results are useless. you think they would have done their homework to determine what is most visually appealing for searchers.
Re:Better response would have been... (Score:5, Insightful)
Nah, Google's biggest threat right now is Microsoft with Bing and they know it. This is why Google recently accepted to allow media outlets to limit the number of articles that could be viewed on Google news before being confronted with a paywall- because some outlets were threatening to delist from Google and only list from Bing, presumably Google felt the threat was big enough that Google news would lose enough content to matter.
This Mozilla guy is playing the same game- he recommended Bing because he knows that word is enough to make Google stand up, take notice and hopefully take action, not because he seriously advocates a search engine switch unless Google really do continue this attitude. A search engine comparison doesn't catch the headlines quite like a high profile mention of a switch to Google's main search threat.
Re:Uh... why does it read like (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Privacy fears (Score:5, Insightful)
It might suck until you found another job, but at least you didn't end up working for some religious tight ass.
Re:Privacy fears (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm all for discussion and criticism of Schmidt's statement, but I'm not sure I want to punish a company because their CEO was actually honest about their beliefs.
What more do you want? Confirmation from Netcraft? These sort of PR slips aren't allowed very often, and for good reason.
If you don't agree with the CEO's attitude, why shouldn't you stop using their services?
I'd rather go by the actions of the company.
In Google's case their actions show they don't respect your privacy, but they're pretty open about their lack of respect.
For MS I honestly don't know a lot about their actions on privacy, but I doubt they'd be any better than Google and I don't want to reward them for hiding their intentions.
Re:problems with bing (Score:2, Insightful)
in my opinion, both (all) companies should completely open up their search api's, so that browsers and perhaps other 3rdparty-websites can implement their own presentation logic.
if bing wants to gain some more users, they can start by doing that... i don't think anything else is going to help them much...
Mozilla did not *recommend* it... (Score:3, Insightful)
This post puts words in Mozilla's mouth. While this was a high-profile Mozilla figure (Asa Dotzler), it is his personal blog, so keep in mind it's just what he thinks, not any recommendation on behalf of Mozilla.
In any case, his exact words [mozillazine.org] were, "And here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)" That's not exactly a whole-hearted recommendation; it's saying, "Here's something bad, but this is how you can switch it to something better." And again, of course, it's just his opinion based on the respective privacy policies--but, if someone appeals to the PATRIOT Act like Google was talking about, I'm not convinced it matters either way. (Just because it's not tied to your account doesn't mean they can't figure it out.)
Re:Privacy fears (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think Google is any different from any company, to be honest, and I don't tell them anything they don't need to know about me. I still think Schmidt's quote was turned from a fairly mild statement (if it had been communicated properly) into a fearmongering rampage, but if it made somebody wake up and start being smart about what they post, I'm all for it.
Re:Privacy fears (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [npr.org]).
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.
Re:Privacy fears (Score:3, Insightful)
Just because there's nothing wrong with what you do today, doesn't mean someone won't decide it was wrong tomorrow.
Re:Schmidt is just being honest (Score:3, Insightful)
Everyone should be concerned about privacy. Only a fool thinks they have nothing to hide. Would you honestly trust this bat shit crazy society to judge you correctly or to not abuse their power?
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Google (Score:2, Insightful)
What search terms are you using that give markedly different results in Bing than Google?
Re:Bitter (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, firefox needs to get its act together and remember what their original purpose was because I've noticed a lot of average users complaining about the last couple Mozilla releases being buggy and slow across all platforms. On the windows side, quite a few have already flocked to Chrome an a few to Opera. OSX, a lot of folks have gone back to Safari.
Re:Google (Score:2, Insightful)
Your statement is true. however you miss the point entirely. Yes google would turn over the data and yes microsoft would turn over the data. The fact is that google is the one storing all of this data and microsoft is not. If google was not storing all of this data the government in this example could not force google to turn it over. Not because of "want" but because of "ability". If the government requested it google would simply not have it... and that would be the end of it(more or less)... But since google dose have it they will turn it over.....
Two Problems (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Google (Score:4, Insightful)
...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.
Re:Google (Score:3, Insightful)
For MS I honestly don't know a lot about their actions on privacy, but I doubt they'd be any better than Google and I don't want to reward them for hiding their intentions.
You don't know about Microsoft's actions on privacy and you have no idea what they say about it. Did you know that both Bing and Google have their (very extensive) privacy policies linked on the bottom of their search pages?
Microsoft have got quite good at listing privacy policies and asking for permission before having their Windows software call back to home base. Generally speaking you can opt out of sending info back to their servers with the obvious exceptions like Genuine Windows Advantage and the annoying exception of Microsoft Security Essentials - where you have to choose either basic or advanced membership of Microsoft SpyNet (which collects info about discovered malware). I'm sure that previously you could opt out of that system.
I've read some of Google's privacy policies, as for MS I haven't read their policies and don't use any of their products.
Using Windows as the basis for comparison isn't the best thing since it's a different business model. Google's ad based model relies on a certain lack of privacy, and unless MS plans to lose money on Bing they'll have to look at the same trade-offs.
Re:Privacy fears (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there are more important privacy concerns then someone's enjoyment of porn, which no one is likely to discover anyway.
How about political or religious views which people are far more likely to express on social sites? Perhaps some atheist will decide they don't want you working for them because you're a devout Christian. Or a conservative manager wont hire because they've read up on your liberal views. The discrimination doesn't only go one way. And then there's the bigger danger of people have access to your medical records. Imagine the difficulty you might face if employees know you have a persistent medical condition that might necessitate some time off.
Re:Respecting Your Privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
Even to the point of hiring contractors to take pictures of your house (from the "street" of course).
I wish I had mod points to mark you flamebait for this just for how you stated this.
Creating maps where you can actually view the street that you are going to be going to is only a natural extension of what had already existed. I remember wanting a feature like this the first time I heard about MapQuest. I'm glad Google went ahead and did it. It's not like Google is saying, "Bill_the_Engineer LIVES HERE!" Your comment is akin to someone from the 1700's saying, "Mapmaker John is violating your privacy by creating a MAP where he marks ROADS that lead right to your house!!!"
Give me a break.
Re:Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Privacy fears (Score:3, Insightful)
Because Google will give your search history to every two-bit company director out there.
As a two-bit company director, I am shocked and appalled at the suggestion that Google might not give me access to everything!
Joking aside, knowledge (information) is power; there are well known implications of private data being publicly accessible on the internet (like prospective employers searching, etc etc) but when highly personal or sensitive information is in the hands of a small number of people (e.g on a government system, or at Google etc etc) there is a real potential there for blackmail or other nefarious uses. I'd rather not (given the choice) have detailed data about my personal, political or sexual preferences, or health, or quite a lot else, sitting on a database somewhere waiting, itching for somebody to misuse it. It's not hard to imagine ways that it might be.
Yes, I do currently still use Google to search, but their stated attitudes bring closer the time that I'll start not to.
Its not (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Privacy fears (Score:2, Insightful)
What if you get the job and on your way to your first day of work someone knocks you out and puts your body through a wood chipper?
My point being, I don't care about those things. You can care about them, that doesn't bother me any, but I'm not going to care about them. That isn't to say that I do not see the value in constructing a legal framework that attempts to protect the privacy of individuals, I just place a much higher value on dealing with people who respect me than I do on dealing with people who simply respect the law when dealing with me.
Re:Make privacy easy (Score:3, Insightful)
A couple of things....
First, encryption doesn't guarantee privacy - it just makes it more difficult to read the contents of something. It's a constant one-upping as we use better encryption techniques and get better technology.
The best encryption will probably be laughable in 20 years. Probably less. Look at WEP. Less than 10 years for that to be considered worthless.
From wikipedia....
"...no public-key encryption scheme has been shown to be secure against eavesdroppers with unlimited computational power. Proofs of security for asymmetric key cryptography therefore hold only with respect to computationally-limited adversaries"
So, really, what I've said is correct. It's just a question of degree. If you want to be president of the United States when you are 55, what you said back in an 'encrypted' e-mail when you were 19 about how you hate ______ people; well, that could come back to bite you. Theoretically.
Second, the public key/private key system isn't perfect for the same reason that PGP doesn't really work that great. If you want to communicate with someone you need for *them* to already have a public key.
Let's say you are a famous person, like Tiger Woods and you want to chat up the hottie you met at a golf tournament - and you don't want anyone to see it. Well, the odds of her having a public key/private key pair setup so that you can e-mail her and have her read it....virtually zero.
Third - There have already been demonstrable exploits to SSL. I understand that SSL is just one type of asymmetric encryption; but it's probably the most relevant to our discussion.
Here's an article about one of them.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/07/kaminsky/ [wired.com]
The catch there, isn't that they've managed to crack the encryption algorithm or any of that jazz; but they've found a way around it. It works. It allowed them to impersonate others and get vital, supposedly safe thanks to our asymmetric encryption, data. So, I guess it's only as good as the weakest link?
Fourth - the encryption only protects the content of your message *in transmission*. So, even if that hottie you hit on behind your wife's back does have a public key and can decrypt your encrypted message....you have no control over the security of her PC. It could be compromised in a number of ways. And, if you are a typical user (IE - non techy) there is a reasonable chance that your computer is compromised. And, then you've got the whole 'the recipient' can make copies of whatever you sent. They can decrypt it and post it on the internet, forward it to everyone, take a screen shot, pull out a digital camera and take a picture of the screen and mail it out to everyone.
Bottom line is, nothing we've got even comes close to a guaranteed, lasting, privacy solution.
Re:Privacy fears (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, because a friend would never post a picture of you going crazy at a party. And most certainly, an Ex would never post compromising photos of you for breaking up with her. Clearly, common sense will prevail. Now if only you had some.
Re:Privacy fears (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Privacy fears (Score:2, Insightful)
If I google for how to make bombs, does that mean I'm making a bomb? What if I want to protect something from a homemade bomb or find out if someone is making it? What if I'm interested in practical chemistry?
In some circumstances, privacy is forced upon you (you mustn't be naked on TV), in others, it seems, it's hardly an option.
Re:Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow - so you think privacy only applies to people you like? Or people not being accused of crimes you detest?
I agree that child pornographers are scum. I certainly approve of legal action against such despicable low-lifes. But privacy applies to everyone under the law otherwise child pornography becomes a convenient weapon to level against your enemy without any care for justice.
Re:Google (Score:3, Insightful)
We don't.
I need a license to get married and a license to open a business. I need a license to drive on the roads I pay for and a license for my dog to keep his nuts in my county. I need a license for my gun and a license for my trailer. The list goes on. Free society? Where?
And anyone who really believes they live in a free society, please let me know so I can either remind you that you're a naive asshat or start working on expatriating if it turns out you do, indeed, know your ass from a hole in the ground.
Re:Privacy fears (Score:3, Insightful)
Generally speaking, I have far less reason to fear Google than Microsoft. Microsoft has repeatedly broken the law for its own end. As far as I know, Google has no record of similar transgressions.
Google doesn't seem to have a problem with selling the information they gather to every other single evil company out there that has or hasn't broken the law. They don't need to do evil if they can profit off of those who do. I don't think it's that conspiratorial. I just want to point out that the moral black and white of large tech companies and the IT industry in general is a lot more shades of gray than some clear good and evil division.
[consiparacy_theory_on]
I think the blog's reference to Schmidt was just an excuse (one they've been looking for) to make a shift away from Google. Google hasn't changed its policy or methods so why should Mozilla bark because Google's exec makes a controversial statement. Google has made a really good open source browser and that's what really bothers Mozilla. As a matter of opinion, Google has made a better (faster more standards compliant) browser than Mozilla has. They have implemented a clean UI, fast JS engine, webkit rendering, and now plug-ins. This is Mozilla's competition, not IE or Opera. Chrome has just been released in beta for both OSX and Linux (links are on the Chrome website [google.com]). It only makes sense that Mozilla will politicize a sensitive subject and look for a break from Google.
[conspiracy_theory_off]
Re:Google (Score:2, Insightful)
Eh? I have nothing against open source. In fact I maintain linux servers on my daily job every day and think they're a lot better suited for the job than MS servers. But I do see and acknowledge both Windows and Linux problems and comment upon those - after all, that's what is going to fix the issues, not ignoring them and stamping "anti-open" on everyone that points out flaws in Linux.
Everything that aside, what does this has to do with Google? While Google does provide software open sourced for people while it's within their business goal, they're far from true open source culture. Just try to get any of their web services backends and you see why.