EFF & Privacy; hopefully Ubuntu will listen to users

[Aurélien Naldi]

On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 4:28 PM, C de-Avillez <hggdh2 at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> On 05/11/12 09:08, Jordon Bedwell wrote:
> > This is from my perspective though
> > and I have not really followed all too closely since I am the type of
> > person to remove what I don't want and block stuff like Canonical's
> > NTP and other tracking via our hardware firewalls instead of
> > complaining about stuff that I myself can fix.
>
> I am curious on what is this "block stuff like Canonical's NTP and
> other tracking...".
>


Hi,

wild guess: "other tracking" may be completely unrelated to canonical here.

On "Canonical's NTP" it is indeed some kind of tracking, I remember seeing
some estimates of the global number of ubuntu users based on statistics
from canonical's NTP servers.
To be perfectly clear: there is IMHO nothing wrong about this, I see more
value in this kind of statistics than I have problems with canonical
knowing my IP address and the time at which I turn my computer on.
I just agree that it is indeed some form of tracking.

On the more specific problem of amazon search integrated into unity, I
think the feature is a pretty cool one and I suppose that canonical did
honestly what it could to respect privacy here, but I share the EFF's
concerns as well. IMHO, it would not be a bad move from canonical to make
it opt-in (and to advertise it when it is disabled) or to add a button to
"include web results in this search" on demand.

Best.

-- 
Aurélien Naldi
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