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by zanny 4440 days ago
They never gave out personal information, they just covered your dash with ads and clicking them gave Canonical affiliate revenue. They routed the searches through their servers to prevent Amazon from associating searches and IPs when they go to the actual site.

And I (think?) this is the release where dash ads are default off.
2 comments
ihsw 4440 days ago
There is no proof that they're not passing that information onto Amazon, and it's just a policy on their end. Policies can change and then we will have no recourse.

The dash shouldn't be sending any user information to begin with.

I get that Canonical needs to get profitable fast, so personally I think they should take the RedHat road and release 'Ubuntu Enterprise' or something to that effect.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/how-red-hat-killed-i...

The 14.04 release has quite clearly shown that they have the expertise and industry collaboration to get the ball rolling on that.

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smacktoward 4440 days ago
> There is no proof that they're not passing that information onto Amazon, and it's just a policy on their end. Policies can change and then we will have no recourse.

Except for turning it off via the clearly marked option in the settings, or running a script that patches the feature out, or going into the source code and patching it out yourself, or waiting a few months until Canonical switches the default to "off."

But yeah, other than that, you have no recourse.

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higherpurpose 4440 days ago
I believe Microsoft did the same thing with Windows 8.1 (local file searches pass on to advertisers).
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gcb0 4440 days ago
They send to Amazon what you type. And default was always on. And in latest versions option to disable was removed, you had to remove one package because "Ubuntu is about simplicity"
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keithpeter 4440 days ago
"And in latest versions option to disable was removed"

Nope, wrong way round. After the - er - strong reaction to the original appearance of the Amazon feature, later versions had a kill switch under Privacy. It was always possible simply to uninstall the appropriate package.

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gcb0 4439 days ago
when first introduced you could disable Amazon and keep useful ones like Flickr.

Layer you could only disable all. To disable only Amazon you had to remove a package or something.

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jcastro 4440 days ago
You can shut it off in the Privacy panel.
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