Just to keep things straight, amazon and ebay don't collect any personal information for both affiliates and buyers. Hell, for me amazon shows respective regional channel (like link from canada shows me canadian and US shows US shop) so it's not even demographically monetized yet. When that happens we can shout loud about it. Google Content commerce and Skimlinks (Googles new official affiliate link network) tracks user data and is shown to advertisers for monetizing. Same goes for ebay. Using aff links doesn't make software bad, if that's the case then people need to ditch Mozilla and chrome too. If ubuntu is bad, I wonder why not Mozilla is bad. sigh.

...If ubuntu is bad, I wonder why not Mozilla is bad. sigh.

Not "bad". I had always considered Ubuntu to be essentially "useful/good" - very good, actually. Same goes for Mozilla.
The issue for me is the degree to which anonymity/privacy can be maintained. That seems to be under threat - e.g., from things such as affiliate marketing systems, because of (see above).

It seems ironic that I use a non-proprietary browser (Firefox) which apparently operates some kind of affiliate marketing model, but before I start to use it I have to burden it with a swathe of add-ons and scripts in an attempt to protect my anonymity/privacy, and even then it's unlikely to be 100% effective. At least Firefox allows me to do this relatively easily, unlike the proprietary IE, and now (with increasing difficulty) the proprietary Google Chrome - both of which seem to be designed to tightly control the user's freedom of action to avoid/frustrate affiliate and other marketing.

Long live Ubuntu! (Though I have only used it a bit.)

I didn't get you there.

Is this mentioned on the ubuntu site?  In clear view, in plain terms where you get the distro?

No. It was always there from release 10.04, 3 years back. I am surprised that people found out so late. Same with Mint, gnoppix, mephis and few other distros, none of them have it mentioned on their site.

Then that's the how.  It's not right for any of them, frankly.

In general I have problems with an OS with tight hooks to Advertisers. It just feels dangerous.

Conceptually, if it takes expert-level skill to disable dangerous features, then we are already on the wrong path...

Not "bad". I had always considered Ubuntu to be essentially "useful/good" - very good, actually.

It is not.