Hot off the press from Ars Technica, word of Mozilla"s director of community development, Asa Dolzler"s comments permeate the eardrums of Google lovers worldwide. Catalyzed by Google CEO Eric Schmidt"s comments on privacy, Dolzler, on his private blog, is telling Firefox users to ditch Google for Microsoft"s Bing, stating that Bing provides superior security.
In a recent interview with CNBC, 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."
Dolzler"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."
There"s no way to tell what kind of effect Dolzler"s comments will have on the already shaky Google/Mozilla relationship, as Mozilla relies heavily on its income from Firefox"s Google search deal. Questions about the two companies" marriage spawned when Google released Chrome, back in September of 2008, to directly compete with Firefox. Dolzler seems to disregard the relationship altogether, as he links directly to Firefox"s "only officially supported Bing add-on" at the end of his post, saying, "here"s how you can easily switch Firefox"s search from Google to Bing."
Here"s a video of Schmidt"s comments...