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Comment by meaty | Hacker News Reader

Yes I do use Firefox and that's a rather silly assertion if you consider the technical implementation.

In the case of Firefox, a default search page for Google is included in the Firefox Chrome as is a default search engine. The default page doesn't call home at all until you enter a search i.e. until you use it. The rest of the browser is functional without using this feature, so you can type "duckduckgo.com" without transmitting data to google.

The same is not true for the Unity shopping lens which transmits your searches for local data and applications on your workstation to Canonical and Amazon by default.

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Firefox: Nothing transmitted to Google until you perform a search.

Unity: Nothing transmitted to Amazon until you perform a search

Sure, I'm not agreeing with the default out of the box functionality, but other than the fact that user expectation is that a local search does not transmit information to remote servers (same issue as chrome's omnibox for typing URLs) it is exactly the same. But maybe Canonical should make it explicit what the default does (maybe they do, I don't know)

Install the OS, Click on gear icon (top right), settings, privacy, turn off online results

Point is your specific criticism can be levelled at firefox as well

But in the case of Firefox, you are explicitly trying to do a web search. While in Unity, you are just running your local app launcher.

Confusing a private local search for your own files with an online search that sends information to a third party is is a fairly substantial privacy issue, and the fact that Canonical is just blowing it off (by saying "we already have root") is incredibly concerning about their judgement.

Utter crap. Have you actually tested this? i have!

If I enter analyze.com in the address bar and stop at anal, nothing happens. Nothing is sent.

If i enter analyse in the unity launcher and stop at anal, i get a nasty surprise and permanently get my ip address tagged with anal.

To be fair, I did say this was in Chrome where you get find-as-you-type results.

And secondly, your ip address is not logged. The data sent to Amazon is via Canonical and it's anonymised. If you don't trust Canonical, why are you concerned about using a distribution from them?

Edit: I'm not saying there is no problem and I'm fine with all of this. Just that I wish better arguments were put forward (I'd personally like the functionality made explicit during install/upgrade)

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