I want to know if firefox, mozilla, thunderbird or any of your programs are related to google, internet explorer or the government?

Question

Seems like the US Government have their finger in all things global so wondering if your search engine is truly safe from government interaction?
I've been researching Rense & Moret and not liking what I hear about the US Government and NASA using intelligence to gain information on everyone. Probably a crack pot thing but who in the hell knows for sure.
Just want a search engine that doesn't track everything I do, not that I do anything but the less they know the better. I'd sooner see everyone I know not use Google, Internet Explorer even facebook and twitter seem susceptible to the big pins of information technology.
Is your search engine and email client safe from nosey influential people?

Answer 1

Mozilla takes the privacy of users very seriously, but they can't protect you from everything that other people try to do on the Internet. As dmcritchie says, any network traffic can potentially be intercepted, and a browser can't do anything about that. You can read about what information Mozilla does and doesn't collect, and what they do with in the [http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/legal/privacy/firefox.html Mozilla privacy policy].
Firefox is open source software, which means that anybody can see the source code. If Firefox were doing something nefarious, programmers who are not part of Mozilla would be able to notice, and call them out on it.
Mozilla does have a business relationship with Google in that Mozilla gets money from Google for Firefox users who use Google search. However, Firefox does not require you to use Google search. You can use any other search engine you want. See [[Search bar]] for more info on that.
Firefox supports an option that you can set to tell websites that you do not want them to track you. See [[How do I stop websites from tracking me?]] However, this is a new thing, and only a few websites honor it. (Chicken-and-egg problem) The more users enable the option, the more websites will realize that users really do care about not being tracked, and will pay attention. (Of course, the worst offenders are least likely to care.)
There are also extensions for Firefox that help prevent sites from tracking you. For example, [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/ Ad Block Plus] and [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ghostery/ Ghostery].