Unity is spying on us

Been reading about Canonical changing how Unity works. Apparently they’re going to make Unity 8 ask permission before it sends your searches to Amazon and all these other companies. Why was it doing that in the first place?

I’ve been using Ubuntu since 2008. Switched from Windows back then and never looked back. Unity seemed alright when it came out. Bit different but you get used to it. Then someone told me that every time you search for something on your own computer, it’s sending that to Amazon.

What the fuck? I’m searching for a file on MY laptop and Canonical is sending that to Amazon? That’s not just creepy, that’s a complete betrayal. This is spyware. Actual spyware on a Linux distro.

Mark Shuttleworth keeps defending it saying it’s anonymous and we should trust them. Anonymous? I’m searching for files called ‘Keiron OShea dissertation final.doc’ and ‘KOS_CV_2014.pdf’. Yeah, dead anonymous that. But that’s not even the point. It’s my computer. My files. Why are they sending anything anywhere? I didn’t ask for shopping suggestions when I’m looking for a document.

The whole reason I switched to Linux was to get away from this kind of thing. Windows is bad enough with all the tracking and ads everywhere. Thought open source was supposed to be different. Supposed to respect users. But here’s Canonical doing the exact same stuff.

And it was on by default! You had to know about it and go turn it off yourself. Most people probably don’t even know it’s happening. That’s dodgy.

I get that Canonical needs to make money somehow. Ubuntu is free and they’ve got to pay developers. But there’s got to be better ways than secretly sending our search queries to advertisers. That’s the kind of thing Microsoft would do.

Some people are saying this is the end of Unity. That people will switch to other distros. I moved my laptop over to Gentoo a while ago. Took ages to set up but at least I know exactly what’s on it. Still using Ubuntu on my desktop though. But I’ve definitely lost trust in Canonical. Makes you wonder what else they’re doing that we don’t know about.

At least they’re changing it now. Making it opt-in instead of opt-out. But the fact they thought this was okay in the first place is the problem. Shows they don’t really care about privacy like they claim to.

Linux is supposed to be about freedom and control over your own computer. This is the opposite of that.