Privacy? I remember it well! [LWN.net]

Privacy? I remember it well!

Posted Sep 24, 2012 20:38 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Amazon search results in the Dash

I suppose this is just part of a continuing trend with Ubuntu and also with various applications to leak information onto the Internet for questionable benefits in return.

Of course, it can be said that with browser search boxes pointing at Google by default, there's already an uneasy contract between the user and the organisation whose logo is next to the text widget, and I'm sure there have been quite a few accidental queries over the years.

And stuffing an application's menu with "Share on Facebook/Twitter/Picasa/Flickr/Pastebin!", although potentially confusing to new users and yet tempting to those who just want a simple "sharing" solution but who lack the experience to be able to consider that solution's cost in terms of relinquishing privacy and control, at least still upholds a distinction between private and public domains.

But integrating various online services with a built-in desktop feature that the user is relying upon to perform local operations really does border on an intrusion of privacy. It's bad enough that there are actually adverts in Ubuntu - go into the software centre and there's a banner advert, Web 2.0 style, for various products - but playing fast and loose with data originating in a private context is inexcusable.

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Privacy? I remember it well!

Posted Sep 25, 2012 4:23 UTC (Tue) by jnh (subscriber, #69758) [Link] (5 responses)

Agreed. Catering to the "Just Works"/ease-of-use-über-alles crowd by relying on integration with 3rd party services is just asking for privacy troubles.

By acting as a proxy for the searches, Canonical creates another potential point of compromise in the information chain, increasing the attack surface, in the parlance of our times. Shuttleworth's argument that using Ubuntu is tacit consent on the part of the user to trust Canonical to not abuse or backdoor their software packages ignores that users are unable to audit this proxy infrastructure, whereas auditing the behavior of locally running software is actually doable. Even if Canonical is trustworthy, funneling user data into a central location creates nontrivial risk, and is of questionable design. (That isn't to say it doens't have advantages, obviously Canonical can smooth over 3rd party search API version-churn on the back-end this way, but is it worth it?)

Ubuntu is, was, and will always be, a consumer-grade distribution, and everything that implies.

Privacy? I remember it well!

Posted Sep 25, 2012 10:12 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (4 responses)

So? What is wrong with being a consumer-grade distro? Ok, Canonical claims sometimes to be more than that but pretty much nobody takes that serious so it isn't very harmful. The commercial grade distro's RHEL and SLE are well-entrenched in their niches and there's plenty of use of DIY distro's like Debian and Gentoo too. The serious-deployment ecosystem doesn't need Ubuntu...

Privacy? I remember it well!

Posted Sep 25, 2012 15:13 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (3 responses)

I can see Gentoo as a "do it yourself" distribution, but Debian? Or maybe you meant "decide it yourself", at which point I must suggest "decide for yourself" or DFY as the term of choice.

Depends on what you mean by DIY

Posted Sep 26, 2012 10:13 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (2 responses)

Debian is firmly a DIY distro, in the sense that it has everything, you select only the packages you need (what some people call a meta-distro). By design there isn't even a single supported desktop or kernel (although there are defaults). The core is a minimal system; on top of it you can build a multi-environment desktop or a barebones server.

Depends on what you mean by DIY

Posted Sep 26, 2012 12:25 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, but Debian and Gentoo still have quite some distance between them. The former offers choices ("decide for yourself") and then serves up the experience, whereas the latter involves a lot more self-assembly ("do it yourself"), although I suppose that you can just download binary packages for Gentoo these days and ignore the self-assembly part.

There are defaults, as you say, and that leaves the principal difference between Ubuntu and Debian as being (with the former) that someone else is not only setting the defaults, but also deprecating the other choices and also adding stuff that decides other things on your behalf.

But there's nothing inherent in Debian that should make it "difficult" while Ubuntu must somehow be the "easy" choice.

Depends on what you mean by DIY

Posted Sep 26, 2012 18:52 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

Actually, since Ubuntu has basically everything available that's available in Debian, it doesn't eliminate your option to choose something else, it's just a different set of defaults on a different release schedule.

These two things (a faster, predictable release schedule, and usable defaults) are what has made Ubuntu popular.

At the time Ubuntu started, getting a new desktop/GUI system running was a fairly significant amount of work (not as much work as some made it out to be, but work). After Ubuntu demonstrated how easy it should be, the other desktop distros have drastically improved. Unfortunantly, Debian has not gotten quite as good, some of it may be that Debian is aimed at a far wider range of uses than just the Desktop/GUI segment.