And I (think?) this is the release where dash ads are default off.

The dash shouldn't be sending any user information to begin with.

I get that Canonical needs to get profitable fast, so personally I think they should take the RedHat road and release 'Ubuntu Enterprise' or something to that effect.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/how-red-hat-killed-i...

The 14.04 release has quite clearly shown that they have the expertise and industry collaboration to get the ball rolling on that.

Except for turning it off via the clearly marked option in the settings, or running a script that patches the feature out, or going into the source code and patching it out yourself, or waiting a few months until Canonical switches the default to "off."

But yeah, other than that, you have no recourse.

Nope, wrong way round. After the - er - strong reaction to the original appearance of the Amazon feature, later versions had a kill switch under Privacy. It was always possible simply to uninstall the appropriate package.

Layer you could only disable all. To disable only Amazon you had to remove a package or something.

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.

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.

You can either explicitly search locally by using Super-A, or turn off online search in the dash entirely via the privacy panel.