Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth Wins Austria's Big Brother Award

Posted by Unknown on from the it-burns dept.

sfcrazy writes "Austria's Big Brother Awards awarded the coveted Big Brother Award to Ubuntu's founder Mark Shuttleworth for Ubuntu Dash's privacy reducing online extensions to local searches." From the article: "What’s bad here and raises question here is that despite repeated requests Canonical refused to make the tracking option opt-in. The feature is installed and enabled by default so the moment one install Ubuntu it starts sending info to Canonical servers until the user deliberately disables it."

23 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Wut? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If that is the biggest brother in Austria, they are living in paradise.

  2. selling data by I.M.O.G. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most people within core mass market demographics don't realize or care how much data they send, so defaults are important economically. If the financial motivations are in the wrong place, the wrong decision will be made for invested parties. I don't know of any business that is successful and doesn't exploit this general sort of opportunity. It paints Ubuntu as a villain, but its more business as usual and isn't unique to Ubuntu.

    --
    Overclockers
  3. You are small time by sqrt(2) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can think of someone more deserving.

    --
    If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
  4. Riiiiiight... by FuzzNugget · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Because, of all the privacy violators made apparent in the past several months, Canonical is clearly the worst offender.

    1. Re:Riiiiiight... by Nerdfest · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Regardless of whether or not it reduces market share, it's behaviour that should be discouraged. There's frequently a difference between doing what's popular and what's right.

    2. Re:Riiiiiight... by sgage · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Discouraged, yes. Though I just installed the latest Ubuntu and this stuff was opt-in, so perhaps the cries were heard. My point is that to award this distinction to Ubuntu in the face of all the crap going down on the Internet is simply absurd, extremely small potatoes, and smacks of sour grapes and/or piling on, which is the norm for the FOSS press.

      What's popular isn't always "right" (who decides that?), but we really might maintain a sense of proportion. In over 15 years of observing the FOSS world, it really seems that if you start to get any traction in the wider world, the "community" (as if there were a "community") seems to want to smack it down. For all the talk of world domination and so on and so forth, the "community" seems on some visceral level to want to remain marginal, They are getting their wish.

    3. Re:Riiiiiight... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      The price system in a free market allows people who may ordinarily hate each other to indirectly cooperate by acting in their own interest. FOSS is similar to a free market, with participants acting in their own interest but whose actions indirectly benefit everyone. This chaos of uncoordinated individuals is in fact where FOSS's strength comes from. It is an illusion that centrally-imposed control would lead to any kind of improvement and it may well dissuade FOSS developers from contributing if they feel they are being directed by someone else's interests.

  5. Re:Freedom isn't free by Enderandrew · · Score: 4, Interesting

    FWIW, I don't think Unity has done much to improve the desktop experience, though that is somewhat a matter of taste.

    Canonical marketed Linux to the extent that Ubuntu was tracking higher as a keyword in searches than Linux.

    I'd like to thank the KDE devs however for making Linux usable on the desktop.

    --
    http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
  6. Re:Freedom isn't free by Nerdfest · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not just usable in the HMI sense, but usable because it's solid. Unity is a slow, crashy disaster, and even though I can tolerate Gnome Shell, it's just too unstable to use for real work, with daily crashes. Although these are generally non-fatal, they tend to leave things in a 'not quite right' state. Even the very latest KDE tends to be very fast and very solid these days.

  7. If its free, then you're the product by Gothmolly · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just like Google - YOU are the product, not the search (or other) services.

    --
    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
  8. Re: Freedom isn't free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ok, how do you think they can sustain the operation and remain 'free' then?

    That's not really our problem, is it?

    Other distros doesn't use those tactics and they're doing just fine.

  9. Re:Freedom isn't free by occasional_dabbler · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Harshly stated, but in essence, true: Linux has to generate income. Android does it with massive, unavoidable invasion of privacy. Ubuntu does it with a minor, transparent and easily disabled intrusion into some of your online life. It's not like any of us have any real privacy online anymore anyway, so why not let some of the goodies leak to someone actually fdoing something positive with it?

    --
    "Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs," I said. "we have a protractor"
  10. Re:Freedom isn't free by Enderandrew · · Score: 2

    I haven't checked it out recently, but Ubuntu doesn't necessarily have a reputation for solid bug-free packages that never crash. Ubuntu doesn't have as many engineers, developers or package maintainers as Novell or Red Hat.

    Ubuntu's KDE packages were so famously awful that it soured a lot of people who assumed KDE must be buggy and unstable on its own (when openSUSE and Fedora KDE packages are rock solid).

    --
    http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
  11. There's an axe and I hear it grinding by umafuckit · · Score: 2

    There are better candidates for the Big Brother award than Shuttleworth.

    --
    soylentnews.org
  12. Not the NSA? by NoKaOi · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The article blabs on and on about how this is a Big Brother-ish threat because the data could easily be obtained by the NSA. So why not just give the award to the NSA? Or, if it has to be an individual, then to the president or the head of the NSA? I though maybe it had to go to a company operating in the EU, since Canonical is from the UK, but then realized that we know the NSA operates in the EU too. So, maybe the company is being evil by doing this, but clearly not as evil as the US government and its TLAs.

  13. Re:Freedom isn't free by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Debian does it through voluntary donations.
    20 years and going.

  14. Shuttleworth? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't use Ubuntu as a result of the tracking, but they really couldn't find any product that invades privacy more in 2013? They aren't aware of any websites or applications that silently track users, or any tablet/smarthpone software that accesses private information it shouldn't?

  15. Re:FUD by foobar+bazbot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    They are talking about typing something into a field labeled "Search your computer and online sources.

    Call me crazy, but I normally have a real good idea whether I'm searching for something on my computer or on the interwebz. And the only use case I can think of where I'd ever want to search both for the same thing is if I want to run an app (say, Google Earth) that may or may not be installed, so I want to find and execute the installed instance, if any, and failing that, I'll search the web to find and download the installer. Even then, I want to search first one, then conditionally search the other.

    So to me it's pretty obvious that the more useful behavior is two search boxen, one to search my computer, and the other to search online sources. Or perhaps one search box with two buttons, so I can click the local one, and if I don't get a result, click the web one.

    But, why in Kropotkinsname would anyone want to disable the online search? If you want to get the weather, calculation, wikipedia page, wouldn't you just lookup the result on the web instead? Or even worse: search it with Google?

    Well, there's two points of objection. One is an issue of how many and whose computers see your search queries -- which is ultimately addressable by changing which sources are enabled. In order to do an internet search, you've obviously gotta trust somebody with your search query -- so pick somebody and set up your sources correspondingly.

    The other, and IMO bigger point, is that somebody -- whether it's canonical's search service, google, duckduckgo, or ixquick -- is receiving info every time you use that tool to search for a local document. No matter how much I trust ixquick, it's senseless to entrust them with more data in exchange for no benefit, so when I know I'm searching for a local file, I'd like the easy choice to not have my search query posted to any web search engine. Again, give me two search boxes, or one box with two (or more -- one for each source, one for all sources, etc.) buttons.

  16. Re:Freedom isn't free by cmdr_tofu · · Score: 2

    The Ubuntu LTS releases are actually pretty good. Of course it is just a re-presentation of all the work that goes into the Debian project. I don't like where Ubuntu is going with default Window managers. Ubuntu is what got me off of olvwm/enlightenment and onto Gnome 2. Now I use xfce under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and it's perfectly acceptable, and no intrusive Amazon search.

  17. Hrm... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Everyone seems to be making a mountain over a mole hill, the Amazon lens for Unity isn't spyware and can be easily turned off in the Settings panel and does not send any information personal to the user, it is fully open-source so you can examine how it works and Canonical tell you it's there... How is this spyware ??? Stop trolling a good Os and just turn it off, or better yet, use Xubuntu where XFCE is the default window manager and stop whining...

    1. Re:Hrm... by Fruit · · Score: 2

      You can't switch it off if you don't know it exists. Or is reading slashdot mandatory now if you want to run free software?

  18. Re:Freedom isn't free by RoboJ1M · · Score: 4, Insightful

    They do.
    The ask for a donation when you download the ISO.
    And guess what?
    They complained about that too. Very loudly indeed.
    In summary, there will always be people on forums complaining about everything.
    They will always be first and loudest.
    The people who just install it, judge it good enough and put a dollar in the hat don't go on-line to troll about it.
    Long live Mark, Canonical, Unity and Mir. ;)

  19. So sick of hearing this crap by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You are not the "product" just because you use something appears to have no dollar value assigned to it, and just because I don't pay to use Google or any of their services does not mean they aren't services.

    I pay them with my information and they allow me to use their services. They in turn sell this information to others who associate a dollar value with it. This is not unlike the bartering system where I give you a goat in exchange for you building me a table and you then give the goat to someone else in exchange for gold.

    Yes Google makes money off our information, but good luck getting that information without enticing us with the ability to use their products and services which in turn cost them quite a lot to supply. Anyone who claims that a person is the product is woefully ignorant of the flow of value through Google's intricate web.

    Bottom line is that Google offer many products and services and we pay for them with information.