Mark Shuttleworth Addresses Ubuntu Privacy Issues

sfcrazy writes "Mark Shuttleworth has for the first time talked about the privacy issues in Ubuntu Dash after being criticized by EFF and FSF. He mentioned some changes in the way use can 'disable' the search results. However the company has showed that under no circumstances they will disable the online search by default as demanded by EFF and FSF. Shuttleworth was simply spinning the wheel moving things around to give an impression that something has been done where as the core problem remains — Dash sends keystrokes by default and legally every user agrees to send such keystrokes to PRODUCT.canonical.com server to be shared with partners like Facebook."

Re:Amazing.

[earlzdotnet]

Slashdot ... is much more annoying, since to disable ads you have to download AdBlock.

Or just get positive Karma and check the "disable advertisements" options :)

Re:We should get paid for our data.

[MoonFog]

No. There's a world of difference between the stuff I might put up on a blog, Facebook, G+ and whatever else social network exists, and the data I use my computer to handle. What if you're having legal troubles? IRS are after you? You have applications for a Betty Ford-like clinique? Tax returns? These are things that you're NOT going to be putting up on Facebook or your blog, but documents you might have to have. This is data Ubuntu has no business knowing that I have on my computer.

Re:This is how shuttleworth kills ubuntu

[Yobgod Ababua]

I recently moved from Fedora to Ubuntu because I'm trying to do more dev work and -all- the development tools and library releases these days seem to be more Ubuntu-friendly.

I was more Fedora-friendly because I came from a RedHat admin background, but I kept running into more and more projects/games/libraries that interpreted "LInux support" to mean Ubuntu, so I gave in. Since then it's actually worked out pretty well, although I still prefer yum to apt-get...

Xubuntu

[Dr. Manhattan]

Does everything I need and doesn't waste a bunch of resources.

Re:The End of Ubuntu?

[jma05]

> Anyone who thinks that sending all my keystrokes to their server...

Well. Not ALL keystrokes. Just Unity Dash searches. Doesn't Android's integrated search bar do something like this too? Not that it makes it OK of course.

Re:hello hosts file

[cultiv8]

and just to be sure:

order hosts,bind

Re:Keystroke logging by default?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's really think about this though.

Remember what the significant difference between Ubuntu and Mint was?

Mint installed some popular proprietary closed-source software by default; Something that Ubuntu refused to do.

This meant that you could play MP3s out of the box, without having to type "sudo apt-get blah blah blah...". You didn't have to go on a quest for Flash, SUN Java JDK, and lots of other pretty cool stuff, that Ubuntu turned up it's nose at "because it wasn't open source".

But then this?

Backroom payola deals to install spyware, and whatever else, defaulted to run quietly as background services, by default???

Wow. Just wow.