This is concerning and we need to know exactly how Canonical tracked down the customer's details.

I tried looking for a privacy / terms of use for Azure Marketplace specifically but could only find the generic one for Azure which is too long to read through.

FWIW, I spun up dozens of Ubuntu VMs in Azure and no-one contacted me :) but I didn't go to the marketplace, just picked the default Ubuntu image in the dropdown.

People sometimes turn to Linux to avoid tracking. This is slightly awkward PR for the community in that sense. It took years for people to lower their guards after the Amazon search uploads controversy years ago

> Amazon search uploads controversy

If anyone like me needs context: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2840401/ubuntus-unity-8-desk...

Thanks! Couldn't remember this specific privacy violation amongst the daily occurrence of them by big tech companies.

Fortunately, in the open source world, scandals are still rare enough to be memorable. It’s a little amazing to have such a massive exception to “free (as in beer) means you are the product”

Isn't it because of Ubuntu the OS sending data home? Doesn't necessarily have to be Microsoft's fault.

Bit further down the thread:

> Some speculation that the user spun up a @ubuntu image from a marketplace equivalent.

> If you spun up my CoreyOS marketplace image and I did outreach like that, @awscloud would give me the choice of never saying that again, or being booted off of the marketplace. Trust matters.

He's right. Then again, MS and Canonical both put ads into core OS components.

Further speculation: I got one of these messages on LinkedIn and absolutely don't have Ubuntu instances in any of my Azure subscriptions, but I had related keywords to both Ubuntu and Azure publicly in my LinkedIn. It seemed like really sketchy yet sadly ordinary B2B spam. Looking at the dude's LinkedIn profile the "at Ubuntu" didn't mean "Canonical" but some skeevy looking US-based consultancy that seems intent on trampling Canonical's trademarks that should have been sued months ago (or worse has an active license that should be revoked ASAP).

How would they know the contact details?

There's a service to share it with image publishers. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/partner-c...

Maybe the user used their domain as hostname.

Cross site tracking probably makes it pretty easy for companies to learn whatever they want about a person