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Coming from one of the original, founding members of the Mozilla Foundation, this is pretty serious business. Asa Dotzler, a veteran employee of Mozilla and cornerstone member of the Firefox community, just spoke out on his private blog regarding Eric Schmidt’s recent oratory regarding your privacy — or the lack thereof. “That was the CEO of Google telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy. There is no ambiguity, no ‘out of context’ here,” is Asa’s (pictured right) damning response.

Sure, it’s only a private blog and certainly not the official sentiment of Mozilla or the Firefox developers, but the fact that it’s coming from anyone related with Firefox is pretty big news. Google is Mozilla’s primary revenue stream, you see — they pay to have both that search box in the top right corner and the Google/Firefox default homepage. Dissension that against the hand that feeds you is usually pretty dangerous.

He even goes as far as recommending Bing over Google, citing a better privacy policy. Incidentally, if you want to switch default search engines, did you know there’s a Bing search add-on for Firefox with almost a million downloads? The ‘privacy thing’ is almost certainly just a knee-jerk reaction from Asa though — he’s probably a privacy or freedom advocate, and Eric Schmidt’s latest comments have left most or all of them up in arms. At the end of the day, Bing and Google would both have to hand over the same amount of information to the police, but the continued harrying of Microsoft by consumers and privacy lobby groups mean that their Bing privacy policy is actually better than Google’s — food for thought, eh?

Incidentally, that fateful 30 second video clip of Eric Schmidt’s interview with CNBC finally turned up on YouTube, and is after the break.