We are talking about linux modded by ubuntu, nothing is official for ubuntu. Their kernel is debians child. Their apps are written by other developers. Unity is fork of Gnome 3. Also Myunity is hosted on launchpad (canonical property) for program, bugs hosting and bazaar, also supported under official LTS repo. Besides that they also offered option of turning off the feature, which you can't compare with MS and apple. I don't understand how we are treating canonical on equal footing like MS. If we can treat canonical as spyware then adding adsense ads on any blog also makes that site spyware host, no? Google collects personal data while serving ads, just like amazon.

I am thinking about porting some of skwire's coding snacks to linux. Maybe before next years NANY. I don't know how many I can do but that is definitely in my list.

I do agree that tracking search queries and user behavior is bad. But how many linux users stop using Google for the same reason? Using linux with some ethics and then pointing browsers to Google that does the same like amazon, makes no difference. I don't think they do see this point, so on what stance they say that canonical is not allowed to use amazon search? (We know amazon tracks data just like google and canonical is helping them do that for profit).

The same doesn't apply for their usage of Google because they like it or got used to it etc. I would hold arguments from linux community with much respect if they call "spade a spade" and put every similar card in same line. Especially RMS and EFF when they are making claims out of thin air.

I think RMS and EFF painted canonical in much darker shade using Media. That said, people moving to ubuntu out of consumer frustration and paranoia are smart already to avoid such affiliate links and stuff. Calling it Spyware (fsf reference) and user tracking corporation (Eff reference) is exaggeration, IMO.