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Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth Wins Austria's Big Brother Award
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."
If that is the biggest brother in Austria, they are living in paradise.
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
I can think of someone more deserving.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Because, of all the privacy violators made apparent in the past several months, Canonical is clearly the worst offender.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.