News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Ubuntu 14.04 released. Parent comment

Re:Ubuntu 14.04 released by zanny on Thursday April 17, 2014 @11:43AM (#7604290)
They never gave out personal information, they just covered your dash with ads and clicking them gave Canonical affiliate revenue. They routed the searches through their servers to prevent Amazon from associating searches and IPs when they go to the actual site.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ubuntu 14.04 released by ihsw on Thursday April 17, 2014 @11:47AM (#7604322)
There is no proof that they're not passing that information onto Amazon, and it's just a policy on their end. Policies can change and then we will have no recourse.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ubuntu 14.04 released by smacktoward on Thursday April 17, 2014 @12:07PM (#7604446)
> There is no proof that they're not passing that information onto Amazon, and it's just a policy on their end. Policies can change and then we will have no recourse.

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ubuntu 14.04 released by higherpurpose on Thursday April 17, 2014 @12:13PM (#7604489)
I believe Microsoft did the same thing with Windows 8.1 (local file searches pass on to advertisers).
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ubuntu 14.04 released by gcb0 on Thursday April 17, 2014 @12:06PM (#7604438)
They send to Amazon what you type. And default was always on. And in latest versions option to disable was removed, you had to remove one package because "Ubuntu is about simplicity"
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ubuntu 14.04 released by keithpeter on Thursday April 17, 2014 @01:17PM (#7604904)
"And in latest versions option to disable was removed"

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.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ubuntu 14.04 released by gcb0 on Friday April 18, 2014 @03:25AM (#7608287)
when first introduced you could disable Amazon and keep useful ones like Flickr.

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

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ubuntu 14.04 released by jcastro on Thursday April 17, 2014 @12:08PM (#7604456)
You can shut it off in the Privacy panel.
[ Parent | on HN ]