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There are many consumer-oriented Linux distributions that do not track the user. I'm also pretty sure that Ubuntu does not. You might be thinking of the so-cal
by Sylos 9y ago
There are many consumer-oriented Linux distributions that do not track the user.
I'm also pretty sure that Ubuntu does not. You might be thinking of the so-called "Search Lenses", which sent your search terms from the system search to Canonical's server, then they proxied that to prominently Amazon by default, optionally to others as well, to gather product results for your search term.
Their privacy policy was perfectly straightforward that they do not store the search results or use them for anything else and it's disabled by default since Ubuntu 16.04, and is effectively unavailable from Ubuntu 17.10 onwards, as they switched to GNOME for the desktop environment, which does not support this.
- fredley 9y agoI'm aware that almost all *nix distros don't track, but they might be for us, but they certainly aren't for 99.9% of consumers.
- mindslight 9y agoNeither is Windows 95, because essentially the only feature that makes an OS "for [most] consumers" is that it comes pre-installed on the appliances at Best Buy.
- hedora 9y ago> There are many consumer-oriented Linux distributions that do not track the user. Can you name one?
- Sylos 9y agoI haven't actually checked network requests on all or even most of them, if this is what you're asking, but given how (positively) anal the Linux community is about tracking and how I've not actually heard about anything other than the technological feasibility of Canonical spying on users, I'm rather confident to say that none of the popular ones do. So, to throw about a few names: Debian, openSUSE, Trisquel, Ubuntu, Fedora, Slackware etc. Or to put it differently, the distros of which I'm aware that they track users: Android and Red Star OS.