Privacy and Strange Bedfellows

I’m an IT geek by trade, so it’s nice when cultural and technical stuff intersect. This one is pretty interesting.

Mozilla urges users to switch to Bing

The ripples caused by Google’s Eric Schmidt’s words are spreading further and further throughout the internet. Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, wrote on his blog, urging people to switch away from Google to Bing, which he claims has a better privacy policy. Dotzler points users to the Firefox Bing add-on.

We’ve all read the words from the Google CEO, but in case you’ve been living under a rock, I’ll repeat them once more. "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place," Schmidt argued, "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."

"That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy. There is no ambiguity, no ‘out of context’ here," Dotzler writes, "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)."

Mozilla makes the Firefox web browser, which competes directly with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser. Microsoft runs Bing search, which competes directly with Google Search. Google makes the Chrome web browser, which is based on Firefox, and which also competes directly with Internet Explorer.

So we have Mozilla throwing one of its most important partners under the bus in favor of their common enemy, Microsoft. And Mozilla is doing this because Google apparently has no respect for their users’ privacy.

Mozilla is the big winner here when it comes to credibility and trust.

For those of you who think that Schmidt has a point, that anybody who has something they want to hide must be guilty of something, read this from security expert Bruce Schneier:

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

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For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

[...]

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And it’s our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.