The Inquirer yesterday carried a report in which Canonical, purveyors of Ubuntu Linux, claim that Amazon integration is what users want in Ubuntu.
Canonical released Ubuntu 12.10 on Thursday. This new release introduced tighter integration with Amazon in system search results – a move which has provoked criticism from the Ubuntu community. Canonical asserts that Amazon integration in Dash is something users expect and it will integrate other online services in future Ubuntu releases.
The move was defended by Steve George, Canonical’s Vice-President of communications and products, who told The Inquirer that: “Users increasingly expect to search. It is driven by two things, firstly the fact that online they search, so naturally they think about searching and the other thing is the total amount of content. […] The Dash has previously been restricted to only the things that were on your desktop, so where we are taking the Dash so we are trying to pull it so that everything – your personal cloud – all of your online and offline, everything you have in your universe around you, the Dash will be able to search that and find those things for you.”
Thanks for that Steve. I’ve been using Ubuntu happily on my laptop for two and a half years now, but if you’re going to clamber into bed with the likes of Amazon, I’m putting Debian on that machine when the long term support on my present Ubuntu install runs out.
Update 21/10/12: Bruno Girin has been in touch since I wrote this post and informed me there are 2 options for disabling the Amazon search – turning it off in the system settings and removing the package respectively – as follows:
- Option 1: system settings -> privacy -> include online search results = off
- Option 2: sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping
And of course, you can also remove the package via the software center: fire up software center, search for unity-lens-shopping and remove it.
Also note that the dash now has a small icon in the bottom right that opens a legal notice that explains data collection, points to the privacy policy and tells you how to disable said data collection. That and the fact that they put the shopping lens in its own package that can be removed without affecting anything else show that Canonical did think about potential privacy issues and gave privacy conscious users a way to disable the functionality.
Hi Bruno
Thanks very much for all the additional information re privacy and the removal instructions for those shy of the command line. 🙂