[u2328]

I agree with Mark that it's not worth beating up Canonical over a bureaucratic slip up. Latching on to simple mistakes that are the result of internal miscommunication and misinterpretations of policy is foolish. And ideologues (especially in the software world) love to do that blindly, but it's not intelligent discourse.

That being said, I don't think that absolves Canonical of the underlying criticism: your company is active pushing a product, despite its open-source-ness, that betrays the trust and privacy of your users unless they're informed enough about the situation to opt-out.

I know Canonical is a corporation and has to generate revenue. I won't sit and pretend like I know how to solve that problem for your company. It doesn't change the dilemma, however. I'd like to recommend a user-friendly Linux to my friends and family. I won't recommend Ubuntu until the privacy issue is opt-in instead of opt-out. In fact, if they're less-technical, I recommend iPads and Macs. At least Apple doesn't ship off desktop search results to a third party that we're aware of. I hold enough trust with Apple to believe that they are not. It's unfortunate that I can't say the same for Canonical.

[raverbashing]

The real question is why they allow the new guy to send a cease-and-desist without any revision whatsoever, and why does (s)he think this is correct.

Just goes to diminish my (already very low) opinion of lawyers

[ghshephard]

"At least Apple doesn't ship off desktop search results to a third party that we're aware of"

Care to wager what Apple resells your desktop/iphone/iPad search results for? I'm guessing it's on the order of 100 million dollars/year. Certainly more than 10 million dollars.

[u2328]

Citation please.

[x0x0]

unless there is something new in the latest release of osx 10.9, what on earth are you talking about?

Also, apple sells google the right to be the default search engine on ios (see eg [1]); this is very different than selling your search queries or results. For instance, when you get a google results page, only the very stupidest could be unaware that, well, google knows what you searched for.

[1] http://bgr.com/2013/02/11/google-apple-ios-default-search-1-...

[ghshephard]

Ah. When I first read your response I was wondering, "What possible searches could be resold other than the browser search results."

You obviously can't resell something like a file/application search on the local computer (akin to Spotlight search on OS X).

Apparently I was wrong: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/09/ubuntu-bakes-amazon-...

That is bad on so many levels - privacy, security, network performance, etc... Presumably every time I do one of those searches, traffic is sent over my internet connection...

I wonder what's going through Canonical's mind - And why they think this is a good idea...

[NateDad]

The idea is to join your offline and online worlds. Maybe you don't remember if you had that file on your desktop or google drive or dropbox or ubuntu one. The unfortunate part is that online searches were launched with just Amazon, which makes it look like a money grab, when it was intended just to help the user keep their worlds in order. More online scopes will launch soon, and it'll be a lot more obvious that this is just trying to make your life better.

Yes, Canonical also makes a tiny bit of money for the Amazon integration, but that was not the driving factor behind the feature as a whole. There will be more online scopes to come, and the hope is to make your life easier, by not having to remember exactly where you put all your stuff.

Also, you can easily turn off all online searches with a single toggle inside Settings -> Security and Privacy -> Search.

Canonical knows there is a lot of heat around the feature, and they're not ignoring that, despite what it may seem like from the outside.

[x0x0]

bs. companies implement the most important things first. now maybe canonical is running to implement searching other stuff as a fig leaf -- oh guys, no wait, we weren't just doing this to sell your local searches to advertisers. but if that weren't the purpose dropbox and google drive would have been the first implementations.