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.
"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!
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...
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.
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 :-)
http://linuxbsdos.com/2015/10/28/first-things-to-do-after-in...
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.
Observe by contrast the efforts Google goes to with the Android APIs.
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.
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.