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Ubuntu 16.04 Will Not Send Local Searches Over the Web By Default

Posted by timothy on from the better-path-to-wisdom dept.

jones_supa writes: Canonical introduced Amazon Product Results as part of Ubuntu 12.10, which meant that local searches performed by a user in Dash were also sent online. This made many Ubuntu users spill their coffee and got criticism from EFF and FSF as well. The so called "Shopping Lens" had to be manually disabled if that kind of search behavior was not desired. Finally after years, Canonical is reacting to the negative feedback and respecting users' privacy, so that Ubuntu 16.04 (the next Long Term Support release) won't send local searches over the web by default. The Amazon search feature is still available for those who explicitly want to use it.

4 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. I can't be true by ISoldat53 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Canonical reacted to user feedback? That must be a first.

  2. Follow the money by fishwallop · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The likeliest explanation is that Amazon is no longer paying Canonical enough money for this to be default behavior.

  3. Re:Really Canonical? by DrXym · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Most likely they're not making as much money as they thought and so they're turning it off.

  4. hadn't thought it through in the first place by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Seriously Canonical, didn't you have a meeting on this with the classic PRO vs CON list? Was it inconceivable that some would not like being tracked, even anonymously(if true) and a large portion of that population would be the geeks who you NEED? People, like geeks, who know what GNU/Linux is, why it is used and spread that far and wide and were using Ubuntu and promoting it if not developing for it. Pissing those people off and causing them to move to Debian for example was not a good idea.

    Good to see 16.04 LTS will disable this next year but you really screwed the pooch as they say on this one.