7 ms·

I'm a big advocate for the Linux desktop, but at this point, as long as Canonical has Ubuntu ship off desktop search results to Amazon by default, I would even

by u2328 13y ago

I'm a big advocate for the Linux desktop, but at this point, as long as Canonical has Ubuntu ship off desktop search results to Amazon by default, I would even advocate for users to use other operating systems, even Mac OS X. It's no bastion of freedom respecting software, but at least doesn't ship off your desktop search results to a third party for profit. Ubuntu is no longer freedom respecting software.

jiggy2011 13y ago
The counterpoint of course is that with open source there can always be forked versions with egregious features removed. If OS X decided to record all of your search results you'd be SOL.
- kunai 13y ago
  Not really... pretty much every aspect of OS X is removable, it just isn't as straightforward as Ubuntu and may break portions of the system. You can remove Spotlight and Notification Center with ease, and I doubt it would be difficult to disable recording. Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off.
  - oblique63 13y ago
    > Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off. Really? Wasn't Apple the one tracking iphone users wherever they went? [1] I get the concern about Ubuntu sending data to amazon by default (i.e. can be disabled), I really do, but going out of the way to recommend something as proprietary as either Apple or Microsoft out of spite? This is what really bothers me about the OSS community. How about helping Mint/Fedora out and recommending them instead? I know some do, but even the OP here flaunted that an OSX recommendation seemed more viable than Ubuntu. As much as I would want not to be tracked, at least with Open Source SOFTWARE we can be more aware of it, or even have a say in it; not always so with proprietary stuff! So no, I do not believe either Windows or OSX are better than Ubuntu in this regard. Not to mention that Canonical isn't a big company, so if they need help bootstrapping by doing some stuff with amazon for now, then so be it. I would hold off judgement on their actions until they're actually in a position of real financial power, cause right now it just seems they had to resort to such ad placement deals because the generous donations weren't cutting it. It's really not clear whether it's actually that big of a deal right now. [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-trac...
  - leephillips 13y ago
    Much of OSX is closed source. The only way you know it's not sending out your information is if you continuously monitor and analyse every packet leaving the machine.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    With OS X you get no such guarantee (because the source is not widely available), with Ubuntu you do. For example there is no "OS X Mint".
- anko 13y ago
  With products where you pay for them in advance, you are the customer. So the companies making money off you tend to try and please you. In apple's case, sometimes they make decisions for the good of the user base, and those can annoy users with specific needs, but at the end of the day spying on their users is counter productive to being a profitable business. With ad/search sponsored products ie. google and now canonical, the business has 2 customers. The consumer and the people they are selling ads to. And they aren't even making money off you directly, so it doesn't take much logic to work out where the balance of interests lie.
  - bad_user 13y ago
    That's bullshit, because even if you pay for OS X, Apple can always decide that OS X needs to be sacrificed in favour of iOS. And guess what. With iOS you're the product again, as the real customers are the mobile careers.
    - sbuk 13y ago
      "With iOS you're the product again, as the real customers are the mobile careers." Can you give an example?
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
Afforess 13y ago
Consider the flip side of the coin. The money from Amazon gives Canonical the ability to employ more developers, improve Ubuntu and add features faster, etc.
- nivla 13y ago
  At the cost of privacy? No thanks, instead I will gladly donate to Canonical. Sending it to Amazon doesn't help either. Amazon is the Google of shopping. The more data they have, the better they can guess as to what you want. Search for X on Amazon while logged in and the next day you will receive an email recommending similar items. They have also admitted to storing your watching habits. Every play, pause, rewind and fast-forward is logged while watching a prime video. The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation.
  - kklimonda 13y ago
    To be fair Canonical is using their servers as proxy so the data can be anonymized before it's sent forward to Amazon.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    > The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation. Sure, in a concave down horizontal asymptote kind of way. My impression from things like the Netflix prize is that improving predictive accuracy for recommendations is an extremely high-cost, low-yield endeavor. I remember one day being shocked at the quality of Amazon's recommendations for me (since they'd always been crap), and looking to see how they'd picked such winners. The result? All of those products were ones I'd personally added to my old forgotten amazon wishlist.
    - tomrod 13y ago
      The phrase you're looking is diminishing marginal returns. You hit the behavioral nail on the head with this analysis!
      - 13y ago
nivla 13y ago
Heck even Windows 8 started siphoning local desktop searches to its servers. Sure in both the cases it can be turned off but it is sad to see all OSes converging to a point where privacy is no longer a top priority.
- bpatrianakos 13y ago
  Why do we see all OS makers as the enemy? I don't think they're trying all that hard to destroy privacy. What I see happening is that the average person doesn't care about their privacy to begin with. So OS makers give the people what they think they want. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. And beyond that, these features can be turned off. There's such a fine line to walk between things like privacy and convenience, security and ease of use, etc. There are no right answers either. These issues all come down to what each user personally prefers and OS makers are catering to the majority of their users. It's up to each one of us to pick the best OS for what we prefer, make sure we know what can and can't be disabled, and make your voice heard when you see something you don't like. There's never any guarantees you'll get what you want but if enough people speak up...
siddboots 13y ago
I'm in exactly the same position, having switched to Ubuntu almost a decade ago. There is just no way I can stick with a distro that a) abuses my privacy by selling my search strings by default, and without informing me, and b) thinks it is okay to sell advertising real-estate on my desktop in the first place. For now I've switched to debian on my main machine, and am gradually migrating others.
bpatrianakos 13y ago
No longer freedom respecting? I disagree. Its no longer hardcore hacker respecting but it's still free. Canonical has been walking this fine line between being a serious Linux distro and an OS that has the potential for average people to adopt. At this point it seems that they're finding they can't walk that line without some sacrifices and they seem to be going after the "average person" market in a lot of ways. As it relates to freedom, Ubuntu is still open source and licensed under a free license. Technically it does qualify as being free software. The Amazon results may not be something a lot of us like (including myself) but anyone is free to remove that functionality from the OS. If you choose an OS based on philosophy then I'm not sure that Ubuntu has been on your side for some years now. I don't agree that Ubuntu isn't freedom respecting but I do agree that it probably isn't for you and people like you.
- jfoster 13y ago
  They do ship binary blob drivers. I'm not against that, but for many free software advocates it is considered not 100% free.
1O0101ll100O 13y ago
You do realize Mint is making money off you too...right? http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php
- hillbillyjack 13y ago
  Their (Mint's) modifications are much harder to disable as well. If privacy is a real concern use another distro like debian or arch or ... etc. but don't use Mint which has had questionable browser modifications for a long time.
leephillips 13y ago
"I would even advocate for users to use other operating systems" Wouldn't it make more sense to advocate for other Linux distributions?

by u2328 13y ago

jiggy2011 13y ago

The counterpoint of course is that with open source there can always be forked versions with egregious features removed. If OS X decided to record all of your search results you'd be SOL.

kunai 13y ago
Not really... pretty much every aspect of OS X is removable, it just isn't as straightforward as Ubuntu and may break portions of the system. You can remove Spotlight and Notification Center with ease, and I doubt it would be difficult to disable recording. Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off.
- oblique63 13y ago
  > Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off. Really? Wasn't Apple the one tracking iphone users wherever they went? [1] I get the concern about Ubuntu sending data to amazon by default (i.e. can be disabled), I really do, but going out of the way to recommend something as proprietary as either Apple or Microsoft out of spite? This is what really bothers me about the OSS community. How about helping Mint/Fedora out and recommending them instead? I know some do, but even the OP here flaunted that an OSX recommendation seemed more viable than Ubuntu. As much as I would want not to be tracked, at least with Open Source SOFTWARE we can be more aware of it, or even have a say in it; not always so with proprietary stuff! So no, I do not believe either Windows or OSX are better than Ubuntu in this regard. Not to mention that Canonical isn't a big company, so if they need help bootstrapping by doing some stuff with amazon for now, then so be it. I would hold off judgement on their actions until they're actually in a position of real financial power, cause right now it just seems they had to resort to such ad placement deals because the generous donations weren't cutting it. It's really not clear whether it's actually that big of a deal right now. [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-tracking-prompts-privacy-fears http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-trac...
- leephillips 13y ago
  Much of OSX is closed source. The only way you know it's not sending out your information is if you continuously monitor and analyse every packet leaving the machine.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  With OS X you get no such guarantee (because the source is not widely available), with Ubuntu you do. For example there is no "OS X Mint".
anko 13y ago
With products where you pay for them in advance, you are the customer. So the companies making money off you tend to try and please you. In apple's case, sometimes they make decisions for the good of the user base, and those can annoy users with specific needs, but at the end of the day spying on their users is counter productive to being a profitable business. With ad/search sponsored products ie. google and now canonical, the business has 2 customers. The consumer and the people they are selling ads to. And they aren't even making money off you directly, so it doesn't take much logic to work out where the balance of interests lie.
- bad_user 13y ago
  That's bullshit, because even if you pay for OS X, Apple can always decide that OS X needs to be sacrificed in favour of iOS. And guess what. With iOS you're the product again, as the real customers are the mobile careers.
  - sbuk 13y ago
    "With iOS you're the product again, as the real customers are the mobile careers." Can you give an example?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]

Afforess 13y ago

Consider the flip side of the coin. The money from Amazon gives Canonical the ability to employ more developers, improve Ubuntu and add features faster, etc.

nivla 13y ago
At the cost of privacy? No thanks, instead I will gladly donate to Canonical. Sending it to Amazon doesn't help either. Amazon is the Google of shopping. The more data they have, the better they can guess as to what you want. Search for X on Amazon while logged in and the next day you will receive an email recommending similar items. They have also admitted to storing your watching habits. Every play, pause, rewind and fast-forward is logged while watching a prime video. The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation.
- kklimonda 13y ago
  To be fair Canonical is using their servers as proxy so the data can be anonymized before it's sent forward to Amazon.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  > The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation. Sure, in a concave down horizontal asymptote kind of way. My impression from things like the Netflix prize is that improving predictive accuracy for recommendations is an extremely high-cost, low-yield endeavor. I remember one day being shocked at the quality of Amazon's recommendations for me (since they'd always been crap), and looking to see how they'd picked such winners. The result? All of those products were ones I'd personally added to my old forgotten amazon wishlist.
  - tomrod 13y ago
    The phrase you're looking is diminishing marginal returns. You hit the behavioral nail on the head with this analysis!
    - 13y ago

nivla 13y ago

Heck even Windows 8 started siphoning local desktop searches to its servers. Sure in both the cases it can be turned off but it is sad to see all OSes converging to a point where privacy is no longer a top priority.

bpatrianakos 13y ago
Why do we see all OS makers as the enemy? I don't think they're trying all that hard to destroy privacy. What I see happening is that the average person doesn't care about their privacy to begin with. So OS makers give the people what they think they want. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. And beyond that, these features can be turned off. There's such a fine line to walk between things like privacy and convenience, security and ease of use, etc. There are no right answers either. These issues all come down to what each user personally prefers and OS makers are catering to the majority of their users. It's up to each one of us to pick the best OS for what we prefer, make sure we know what can and can't be disabled, and make your voice heard when you see something you don't like. There's never any guarantees you'll get what you want but if enough people speak up...

siddboots 13y ago

I'm in exactly the same position, having switched to Ubuntu almost a decade ago. There is just no way I can stick with a distro that a) abuses my privacy by selling my search strings by default, and without informing me, and b) thinks it is okay to sell advertising real-estate on my desktop in the first place. For now I've switched to debian on my main machine, and am gradually migrating others.

bpatrianakos 13y ago

No longer freedom respecting? I disagree. Its no longer hardcore hacker respecting but it's still free. Canonical has been walking this fine line between being a serious Linux distro and an OS that has the potential for average people to adopt. At this point it seems that they're finding they can't walk that line without some sacrifices and they seem to be going after the "average person" market in a lot of ways. As it relates to freedom, Ubuntu is still open source and licensed under a free license. Technically it does qualify as being free software. The Amazon results may not be something a lot of us like (including myself) but anyone is free to remove that functionality from the OS. If you choose an OS based on philosophy then I'm not sure that Ubuntu has been on your side for some years now. I don't agree that Ubuntu isn't freedom respecting but I do agree that it probably isn't for you and people like you.

jfoster 13y ago
They do ship binary blob drivers. I'm not against that, but for many free software advocates it is considered not 100% free.

1O0101ll100O 13y ago

You do realize Mint is making money off you too...right? http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php

hillbillyjack 13y ago
Their (Mint's) modifications are much harder to disable as well. If privacy is a real concern use another distro like debian or arch or ... etc. but don't use Mint which has had questionable browser modifications for a long time.

leephillips 13y ago

"I would even advocate for users to use other operating systems" Wouldn't it make more sense to advocate for other Linux distributions?