Well the Amazon ads in Ubuntu absolutely did happen, as well as the searches with the super key. [1]
I'll admit it's maybe a bit of an extrapolation to assume that they're as bad as Microsoft, which is why I disclosed that I didn't have a ton of evidence for this.
Well, here are the facts (I was an insider at the time, and this is my testimony).
Searches were anonymized and sent through Canonical servers to provide extended search result sets. This was configurable and could be disabled. Canonical of course had your IP address so they could reply, just like any and every HTTP server does. Your search query was not stored anywhere or aggregated, and it was not associated back to the originating IP address except to reply. Your privacy was respected and protected at all times.
The Amazon search did appear as a plugin in an early prelease. It was never shipped in a released Ubuntu.
The goal was to make things as easy as possible, even for the technically averse (who were still commonplace a decade ago), while still respecting and protecting your privacy.
Of course, no matter what you do, someone is going to scream for everyone to come witness the oppression inherent in the system. We did it anyway with the expectation of baseless knee-jerk outcry and we were not disappointed.
tombert|1 year ago
I'll admit it's maybe a bit of an extrapolation to assume that they're as bad as Microsoft, which is why I disclosed that I didn't have a ton of evidence for this.
[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/ubuntu-spyware.en.html I realize that GNU is sort of conspiratorial in its own right, but at least one entity seemed to agree that there's problems with it.
bregma|1 year ago
Searches were anonymized and sent through Canonical servers to provide extended search result sets. This was configurable and could be disabled. Canonical of course had your IP address so they could reply, just like any and every HTTP server does. Your search query was not stored anywhere or aggregated, and it was not associated back to the originating IP address except to reply. Your privacy was respected and protected at all times.
The Amazon search did appear as a plugin in an early prelease. It was never shipped in a released Ubuntu.
The goal was to make things as easy as possible, even for the technically averse (who were still commonplace a decade ago), while still respecting and protecting your privacy.
Of course, no matter what you do, someone is going to scream for everyone to come witness the oppression inherent in the system. We did it anyway with the expectation of baseless knee-jerk outcry and we were not disappointed.