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General Software Discussion / Canonical now joins Microsoft and Apple in tracking users of its OS
« Last post by 40hz on January 03, 2013, 09:45 AM »Once again Ubuntu is making history in the Linux world. This time it's the wrong kind.
From OSNews (link):
The above article provided links to a well-balanced EFF analysis that's worth a read since it goes into how this works both from a technical and legal perspective and explains the relatively simple way (currently) to remove the tracking feature. I say "relatively simple" since there's no switch or control panel to shut it off. You need to open a terminal and issue a command (sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping) which virtually guarantees 90% of the people using Ubuntu under Unity will never do so.
And they said innovation was dead at Canonical?
Full EFF article here.
Richard Stallman has also (surprise!, sursprise!
) weighed in on this over at his FSF blogspace. Read what RMS has to say about it here.
In the interests of confining DoCo discussions to mostly technical matters as Mouser has suggested, I'll not comment on any of this.
Onward!
From OSNews (link):
Ubuntu abandons search privacy
posted by Howard Fosdick on Thu 3rd Jan 2013 08:57 UTC
Proprietary software like Windows often includes surveillance code to track user behavior and send this information to vendor servers. Linux has traditionally been immune to such privacy violation. Ubuntu 12.10 now includes code that, by default, collects data on Dash searches. The code integrates Amazon products into search results and can even integrate with Facebook, Twitter, BBC and others as per Ubuntu's Third Party Privacy Policies.
The above article provided links to a well-balanced EFF analysis that's worth a read since it goes into how this works both from a technical and legal perspective and explains the relatively simple way (currently) to remove the tracking feature. I say "relatively simple" since there's no switch or control panel to shut it off. You need to open a terminal and issue a command (sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping) which virtually guarantees 90% of the people using Ubuntu under Unity will never do so.
And they said innovation was dead at Canonical?
Full EFF article here.
Richard Stallman has also (surprise!, sursprise!
) weighed in on this over at his FSF blogspace. Read what RMS has to say about it here.In the interests of confining DoCo discussions to mostly technical matters as Mouser has suggested, I'll not comment on any of this.
OK. Maybe I will just a little?
Onward!
) Quality can be a little dicey with some brands/models - and the jury is still somewhat out on long-term reliability - although it doesn't look like it's gonna be a problem from what we're seeing.