Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?

Post by pasbesoin » Sat, Dec 08, 2012, 5:03 PM UTC

slowpoke wrote: post #204

pasbesoin wrote: post #176

Stuff like this should be opt-in. And, if you want it to succeed, it should be good enough that people want to opt-in. People search on Google -- they opt-in to Google Search -- because the results satisfy them (more than the competition). If Canonical's partners want people to opt-in to their collaborative offerings, they should make them offer significant value. And Canonical, for its part, if they want to successf…

> People search on Google -- they opt-in to Google Search -- because the results satisfy them (more than the competition). Um, no. A lot of people don't even know there is competition to Google. They don't "opt-in" to Google just as much as they don't "opt-in" to using Windows, they've just always used it because it comes with their browser/PC. There's a reason Google pays Mozilla a few million every year to be the d…

Post by wangweij » Sun, Dec 09, 2012, 11:44 PM UTC

marshray wrote: post #178

damian2000 wrote: post #12

Do people using Ubuntu not also use web browsers? If so, then they are also being spied on by others such as google, amazon, facebook, twitter - every time they use one of their sites. I just find it overly dramatic to be focusing on this one point of Ubuntu's search being harvested for keywords when this sort of thing is commonplace on the web. At least with Ubuntu you have the option to turn it off.

Do people using Ubuntu not also use web browsers? Not always. I have some Ubuntu VMs in which the web browsers are prevented from talking to the internet. I use these for secure development and testing of projects that really need to be secret. I do, however, have to allow the system to talk to Canonical servers if I want to have security patches and other software updates. This puts me in the position of having to c…