Stallman On Unity Dash: Canonical Will Have To Give Users' Data To Governments

Giorgio Maone writes "Ubuntu developer and fellow Mozillian Benjamin Kerensa chatted with various people about the new Amazon Product Results in the Ubuntu 12.10 Unity Dash. Among them, Richard Stallman told him that this feature is bad because: 1. 'If Canonical gets this data, it will be forced to hand it over to various governments.'; 2. Amazon is bad. Concerned people can disable remote data retrieval for any lens and scopes or, more surgically, use sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping."

Comments

Re:Or just wipe unity from your machine

[Arker]

I tried Kubuntu once. It was a lot harder to get installed than slackware, and even after getting it all working I didnt like it as much. Slack has a great clean KDE.

Re:Don't use Ubuntu

[Nerdfest]

I think the "ask for it" approach they're trying is a much less evil approach, and would probably pay off more in the long run, both in dollars and good will.

Re:Don't use Ubuntu

[EmperorOfCanada]

With the addition of this feature Ubuntu was crossed off my list. Until now it was Ubuntu for desktops and CentOS for servers. Now it it Mint for desktops and still CentOS for servers. Wow that was hard. Mint is prettier anyway.

Again some MBA was let loose with his spreadsheet. He crunched some numbers and everybody when woooooo. There are all kinds of bad things that look good when put on a spreadsheet. A really nice bold bottom line doesn't make them less bad; it just makes making a bad decision seem better.

Re:Alienating your user base

[bkerensa]

Shuttleworth also in that same blog post in the comments said Canonical had a privacy policy covering the lens.... I was the person who made it clear they did not and they just now added a disclaimer which really does not tell us what will happen to the data like a full privacy policy would.

Re:sad but true

[BeanThere]

Stop worrying about the government, because corporations are already harvesting

Bad governments have killed hundreds of millions in the last 100 years alone ... I think I'd prefer to base what I worry most about on actual evidence, thanks.

Re:sudo apt-get install shred

[maxwell demon]

Here's what the FSF has to say about Debian:

Debian's Social Contract states the goal of making Debian entirely free software, and Debian conscientiously keeps nonfree software out of the official Debian system. However, Debian also provides a repository of nonfree software. According to the project, this software is “not part of the Debian system,” but the repository is hosted on many of the project's main servers, and people can readily learn about these nonfree packages by browsing Debian's online package database.

So with Debian, the people can learn that there is non-free software! Oh the horrors!