I think Canonical has been appropriately forward with discussion of what the situation is, and who gets information. I think it's an awful idea — who really wants commercial results built into their desktop? — but calling it spyware is disingenuous.

I also think it'll kill adoption of Ubuntu. It made me adopt a different distribution, and I think it will cause others to do the same.

> who really wants commercial results built into their desktop?

The distinction between the desktop and the Internet is going away. Some argue that "the desktop is dead"; I just think that it'll get more integrated.

I don't think that this is necessarily a bad thing, providing that you have adequate control over your own privacy settings and have a choice of providers (both large and small). An open source project that is promised to always remain so is the safest place for this, since you'll always be able to find instructions to turn things off if the defaults don't suit you.

I much prefer this over the world switching to web-based hosted solutions for everything.

In fact it turns out that 12.04 has some lens making queries to different services when I was searching stuff using the dash, and I didn't know about it.

I fixed it with: sudo apt-get remove unity-scope-musicstores unity-lens-video unity-lens-music

(I couldn't find how to disable it)

It's not like I agreed to this when I installed the system, because I upgraded from a previous version (and a previous version, etc), and that behaviour wasn't there.

I don't know how Canonical could advertise these changes, but in the Amazon lens case I think RMS did it right.

You can disable it via the GUI in the Privacy settings: http://askubuntu.com/a/192270/235

I said 12.04 and not 12.10. There's no way of disabling the lens I removed in 12.04 (may be because they got introduced in that release).

EDIT: at least I couldn't find a way to disable them. Nothing in privacy settings and nothing with dconf-editor.

rms is being....well, rms in that article.

But if more among us adopted this nuance, it will kill most arguments before they are raised. :-)

Well put.

if you type something in to the search box, and get search results from the internet it is pretty immediately clear that your search string is being sent to the internet. If you can't make that connection, you also likely don't understand the potential privacy risk in having your search strings sent to the internet.

I've yet to hear any valid argument as to why the amazon search is bad that doesn't revolve around some mythical user who is clueless about how computers work, unable to make logical assumptions, and also incredibly privacy conscious.