If people could stop being so paranoid about nothing (the data is anonimised before sent for goodness' sake) then technology can advance much easier and quicker.
It is weird to see the total difference between privacy today (you have none and you have no expectation of any and anyone who has your data will do what they like with it) and what was happening in the early 2000s.
I get that companies feel the need to extract usable data to help fix problems (a sensible data dump is much more useful than a customer filling in a form with wierd information); or to sell anonymosed information.
But customers are right to be untrusting. Some companies have shown that they are not competant to keep data secure. Some companies have shown that they do not care about privacy.
What does sending your local search terms to Canonical and Amazon do to advance technology, exactly? All these desperate attempts at monetization off users' privacy are disgusting, and it's sad to see companies big and small stoop to that level.
Local search terms aren't sent to the web, the Dash is a search box for local and remote sources (it tells you in the description before you type anything in there. The point is for you to be able to search everything in one spot. So you can do `github:docker`, or `wiki:dinosaurs` or whatever.
You can either explicitly search locally by using Super-A, or turn off online search in the dash entirely via the privacy panel.
I get that companies feel the need to extract usable data to help fix problems (a sensible data dump is much more useful than a customer filling in a form with wierd information); or to sell anonymosed information.
But customers are right to be untrusting. Some companies have shown that they are not competant to keep data secure. Some companies have shown that they do not care about privacy.