Digital Home Thoughts: Firefox Executive Recommends Bing Over Google

"Asa Dotzler, Mozilla's director of community development, used his personal blog to urge Firefox users away from Google and to use Microsoft's search engine Bing, instead. Dotzler cited privacy concerns, specifically pointing to comments recently made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "I think judgment matters," said Schmidt. "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Dotzler then links to the Bing add-on for Firefox, stating that Bing's privacy policy is better than Google's (and notably fails to mention Yahoo at all)."

At the least this is a really poor choice of words by Schmidt, if it is more than that, then it is pretty scary. Whether you just don't want to be embarrassed by someone finding out you spend your days searching Twilight fan fiction or more seriously don't want a potential employer or insurer inferring some of the more intimate details of your personal life based on searches, you should have the ability to keep this information private. Plus, what you search is really just raw data and all sorts of conclusions could be inferred by someone not knowing your reasons for performing the search.