I'm sorry, but I think I trust Canonicals' privacy policy as a source more than you:
"Unless you have opted out, we will also send your keystrokes as a search term to productsearch.ubuntu.com and selected third parties so that we may complement your search results with online search results from such third parties including: Facebook, Twitter, BBC and Amazon. Canonical and these selected third parties will collect your search terms and use them to provide you with search results while using Ubuntu."
Source: Ubuntu's third party privacy policy.
* The default was not off in 12.10.
I'm fine if you want to make money this way! That's why you're a company, people need to make money. My argument was that some OSS software sells your search results, one way or another. I didn't take a position in this argument (but you can hopefully guess my position).
Now, you mention that your users complained, which was true. It caused a huge amount of backlash from your established user-base, many of which contributed to OSS themselves and have seen their contributions being monetized by Canonical (which is fine too, no worries). But besides the users, it was the pressure from EFF which caused Canonical to buckle to the pressure [1].
So, I don't care what Canonical underlying assumptions were, I don't care whether it is disabled now, I don't care whether Unity showed affiliate links or not. It's all just distracting from the main point: search terms entered in Unity were send, by default, to third-party servers!
Which was four years ago. It's off now, and has been since 16.04 (the most recent LTS release, which shipped last year).
I agree the Amazon integration in the Dash was a mistake, but it's a mistake that has been fixed. It's simply not true anymore that "Ubuntu unity sells your searches in the desktop environment by default," and continuing to tell people so is deeply misleading.
Perhaps, I wasn't clear enough with my point. You stated that Canonical sold data - "unity sells your searches". I was factually correcting you because it doesn't and didn't. Whereas you said in the previous comment - "search terms entered in Unity were send, by default, to third-party servers!", this is a true statement, though there's far more nuance behind it. The two things are not the same (Canonical didn't sell the searches), and in the context of the wider thread I felt it was confusing.
The rest of your points are personal opinions on users and data privacy, I shouldn't have commented on that area, I apologise. I see no value in getting drawn into discussing the strong emotions associated with this area as it never ends well :-)
"Unless you have opted out, we will also send your keystrokes as a search term to productsearch.ubuntu.com and selected third parties so that we may complement your search results with online search results from such third parties including: Facebook, Twitter, BBC and Amazon. Canonical and these selected third parties will collect your search terms and use them to provide you with search results while using Ubuntu."
Source: Ubuntu's third party privacy policy.
* The default was not off in 12.10.
I'm fine if you want to make money this way! That's why you're a company, people need to make money. My argument was that some OSS software sells your search results, one way or another. I didn't take a position in this argument (but you can hopefully guess my position).
Now, you mention that your users complained, which was true. It caused a huge amount of backlash from your established user-base, many of which contributed to OSS themselves and have seen their contributions being monetized by Canonical (which is fine too, no worries). But besides the users, it was the pressure from EFF which caused Canonical to buckle to the pressure [1].
So, I don't care what Canonical underlying assumptions were, I don't care whether it is disabled now, I don't care whether Unity showed affiliate links or not. It's all just distracting from the main point: search terms entered in Unity were send, by default, to third-party servers!
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/privacy-ubuntu-1210-am...