It connects on-line and off-line searches, so it shows you the result in on-line locations. The underlying assumption was that users increasingly see on-line and off-line content as all part of the same world ("their content").
The commercial aspect was that it connected to places like Amazon. It made money for Canonical by using affiliate links if the user chose to make a purchase.
That is not the same as collecting all the history of the user and (anonymising) then selling that to a third-party or presenting adverts based on that data.
The default is off as users felt searches by default connecting to external services was an invasion of privacy - that's different to "selling searches".
Frankly, this closed-off the last viable manner for desktop Linux to secure a wider revenue stream of sufficient size to drive employing enough full time developers to keep up with the other platforms, in my personal opinion. FOSS doesn't change the dynamic that full-time developers cost real money.
Source: I worked at Canonical from the early days of the desktop, for ~10 years.
I'm sorry, but I think I trust Canonicals' privacy policy as a source more than you:
"Unless you have opted out, we will also send your keystrokes as a search term to productsearch.ubuntu.com and selected third parties so that we may complement your search results with online search results from such third parties including: Facebook, Twitter, BBC and Amazon. Canonical and these selected third parties will collect your search terms and use them to provide you with search results while using Ubuntu."
Source: Ubuntu's third party privacy policy.
* The default was not off in 12.10.
I'm fine if you want to make money this way! That's why you're a company, people need to make money. My argument was that some OSS software sells your search results, one way or another. I didn't take a position in this argument (but you can hopefully guess my position).
Now, you mention that your users complained, which was true. It caused a huge amount of backlash from your established user-base, many of which contributed to OSS themselves and have seen their contributions being monetized by Canonical (which is fine too, no worries). But besides the users, it was the pressure from EFF which caused Canonical to buckle to the pressure [1].
So, I don't care what Canonical underlying assumptions were, I don't care whether it is disabled now, I don't care whether Unity showed affiliate links or not. It's all just distracting from the main point: search terms entered in Unity were send, by default, to third-party servers!
Which was four years ago. It's off now, and has been since 16.04 (the most recent LTS release, which shipped last year).
I agree the Amazon integration in the Dash was a mistake, but it's a mistake that has been fixed. It's simply not true anymore that "Ubuntu unity sells your searches in the desktop environment by default," and continuing to tell people so is deeply misleading.
Perhaps, I wasn't clear enough with my point. You stated that Canonical sold data - "unity sells your searches". I was factually correcting you because it doesn't and didn't. Whereas you said in the previous comment - "search terms entered in Unity were send, by default, to third-party servers!", this is a true statement, though there's far more nuance behind it. The two things are not the same (Canonical didn't sell the searches), and in the context of the wider thread I felt it was confusing.
The rest of your points are personal opinions on users and data privacy, I shouldn't have commented on that area, I apologise. I see no value in getting drawn into discussing the strong emotions associated with this area as it never ends well :-)
I agree it's not the same as collecting user history and selling it to third parties. However, it's still against the expectations of most users of FOSS. These things, if they must be there at all, must absolutely be opt-in, never opt-out. Canonical deserved the backlash.
Yeah, agreed it was against user expectation - it's a great demonstration of what happens when organisations don't prepare their audience well or read the emotional response.
It's a personal frustration and professional regret that desktop Linux is under-funded to compete on an equal footing - the business model challenge feels intractable. RedHat/SUSE, Mandriva and Canonical have tried different options. But, there's been no sustained success that can get desktop Linux over 5% of market. Perhaps Google will have more success with ChromeOS.
You're passionate and certain in your beliefs - probably from a strong philosophical basis; My opinions are formed by my practical "experiences" and hard work for 10 years in this space. There's never been a good quality discussion when philosophical certainty crashes against pragmatic experience!
You're clearly angry, but I don't deserve the implication of being called stubborn, arrogant or aloof.
I've already apologised to you for pushing your comment side-ways in the other thread - I'm not sure what else you'd like from me at this point.
Ubuntu is trying very hard to abide by the letter of Free Software but not the spirit. Is there a solution? Simple: don't use it. There are many other distros out there which do abide by the spirit as well as the letter.
Canonical have tried to do some very good things to, and deserve some credit for successfully making Linux more end-user-friendly. They're not terrible people, just folks with a different set of perspectives & incentives from me.
It was a definite breach of trust. Back when it happened I had to get people to go through a lot of command line fiddling to fix it. I'm still mad that Canonical didn't publish an apology and a hotfix which made the behavior opt in.
Oops, my bad. But at least they did, which was my point to begin with. I said goodbye to Ubuntu and their raking since the notorious community discussion, even before it was implemented. They lost my trust and goodwill with that move.
>>>> _Everyone_ is collecting our data nowadays. Who's left to sell it to?
I confirm that he is probably right about _____collecting____ data. Yes, this most definitely includes FOSS software. If your qualifier for FOSS is not using GA or anything like that than your are right, however, most of probably still count brew as FOSS. Hope that helps.
