[sly010]

Well, what should we be more angry about? That Canonicals sales rep is using data in their CMS, or that Microsoft is selling data to third parties. The root cause seems to be Microsoft, not Canonical and (at least in my eye) the conclusion is not "don't trust Ubuntu", but "don't trust Azure".

[marcinzm]

Someone giving you a gun doesn't absolve you of the crime of shooting someone with it or of keeping the gun.

edit: The data doesn't just magically show up in Canonical's CRM. They spent time and effort establish an integration with Microsoft and then building processes on top of that data.

[com2kid]

As stated above, MS isn't selling this information. They are providing it for customer support purposes.

In the business world, having data marked "customer support only" is pretty common. There are quite a few laws acknowledging the difference. Importantly, the data is supposed to be kept separate and it sounds like Canonical screwed up here.

[phone[phone]]

The takeaway is "don’t trust Ubuntu or Azure".

It’s like if you tell a friend that there's a key to your back door under the mat but to keep it a secret and instead of keeping the secret they tell a mutual friend about it and that mutual friend robs you since they know where the key is.

You shouldn’t trust the friend that told the your mutual friend where the key was and you shouldn’t trust the mutual friend who robbed you.

The friend who told your mutual friend may have done so for what they thought were useful reasons, like letting the mutual friend know so they could fix something for you while you’re out, but they still violated your trust non matter what their intent was.