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Ubuntu's multisearch surprise

Ubuntu's multisearch surprise

Posted Aug 7, 2009 23:42 UTC (Fri) by ewan (guest, #5533)
Parent article: Ubuntu's multisearch surprise

I can see why distributors would like to be able to collect data from users systems, but the right way to do it is by alerting the user to the possibility and asking them to opt in (c.f. Fedora's smolt effort).

The biggest problem here isn't necessarily the extension itself, it's the attitude that leads someone to think that this sort of behaviour is acceptable in a community. Canonical's approach is increasingly like that you'd expect from a proprietary software company.

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Ubuntu's multisearch surprise

Posted Aug 8, 2009 9:57 UTC (Sat) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

The problem is that nobody in Canonical thought "hang on, there are some privacy issues here" and ran it past their lawyers, and whoever's responsible for privacy and (customer) data protection in Canonical. They could quickly have come up with a privacy policy, and preferably an explicit opt-in, that would have avoided all this.

Ubuntu's multisearch surprise

Posted Aug 14, 2009 17:27 UTC (Fri) by spitzak (guest, #4593) [Link]

I agree that they should do the opt-in.

I in fact turned on that other Ubuntu checkmark (I think it is part of Synaptic?) to indicate that I can allow them to collect statistics on something (what software I install?). I don't have a problem with this but it is nice that there is an opt-in and it is off by default. I see no reason why they did not do the same thing with this.


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