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my problem is with using the term "spyware"my problem is with using the term "spyware"Posted Dec 17, 2012 20:10 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: my problem is with using the term "spyware" by hummassa Parent article: Ubuntu, non-advertisements, and spyware
Thanks for clarifying what I've been trying to say. I'm not saying that what Dash is doing is perfectly OK, I'm just saying that it's not "spyware".
That being said, while I am unlikely to ever use Dash (in spite of the fact that I do run Ubuntu, I use KDE not Unity), I don't see this as the end of the world that many people are making it out to be.
People are starting to expect that "search" doesn't just mean "search locally", it also means "search on the Internet". Many of the search tools that they interact with (Chrome and IE address bars for example) default to this already.
If I was doing the UI for Dash, I would have a toggle off to the side to switch between "local only" and "local + Internet" search modes (and I would be Ok with it defaulting to "Internet"). But I know from painful experience that I'm a lousy UI developer :-)
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my problem is with using the term "spyware" Posted Dec 17, 2012 23:31 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]
" People are starting to expect that "search" doesn't just mean "search locally", it also means "search on the Internet". Many of the search tools that they interact with (Chrome and IE address bars for example) default to this already."
The evidence you provide to support your assertion that is somehow people's expectation that search results will connect to internet automatically is very weak. Internet browsers may search the internet and that by itself is not very surprising but desktop interfaces in general do not connect to the internet to search things automatically by default. GNOME Shell for instance, used to provide link to wikipedia and google from the shell search interface but it did NOT search google and wikipedia by default. That would have been a surprising privacy violation.
The primary reason Canonical seems to be doing it is because of a commercial contract with Amazon. If you can point to any other OS search interface that connects to the internet by default to get search results, you might have a point. As it stands, I think this is very much a unprecedented move and not at all in line with what users expect.
my problem is with using the term "spyware" Posted Dec 18, 2012 0:06 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
Like I said, If this is a good thing or not is something that people can honestly disagree over.
I'm somewhere in the middle. It's not something I will choose to use, but I don't see it as being evil.
The only thing I really disagree with is applying the term "spyware" to it. It may be wrong for other privacy reasons, but "spyware" isn't "anything that can leak information"
my problem is with using the term "spyware" Posted Dec 18, 2012 0:08 UTC (Tue) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]
> The primary reason Canonical seems to be doing it is because of a commercial contract with Amazon. If you can point to any other OS search interface that connects to the internet by default to get search results, you might have a point. As it stands, I think this is very much a unprecedented move and not at all in line with what users expect.
Well, actually... The new Android has a local+remote search enabled by default, and iOS also does some surprising searches. That was the main reason why I said "at the present time"...
my problem is with using the term "spyware" Posted Dec 18, 2012 18:32 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
Aren't we looking at the classic slippery slope with this? At first, people claim that it isn't a problem because only one desktop function does it (and not even one which is explicitly Internet-oriented), and as more applications "dial home" as a matter of routine, people will still claim that it isn't a problem because only a minority of applications do it, and then because not all applications do it.
Ultimately, you have a free-for-all like in the smartphone "app" world where suddenly applications are uploading all sorts of things to the mothership. Even then, people will defend this sort of thing because "it's so convenient".
Integrating Internet services into applications isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if the business model of the month is all about keystrokes being remotely logged or whatever, people should be made very much aware that this is happening in advance so that they can avoid the product completely if they want. Mumbling that such behaviour can be turned off is not sufficient because most users will never be made aware of the situation in the first place.
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