Hacker News Reader

Comment by u2328 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big advocate for the Linux desktop, but at this point, as long as Canonical has Ubuntu ship off desktop search results to Amazon by default, I would even advocate for users to use other operating systems, even Mac OS X. It's no bastion of freedom respecting software, but at least doesn't ship off your desktop search results to a third party for profit.

Ubuntu is no longer freedom respecting software.

View on HN

No longer freedom respecting? I disagree. Its no longer hardcore hacker respecting but it's still free. Canonical has been walking this fine line between being a serious Linux distro and an OS that has the potential for average people to adopt. At this point it seems that they're finding they can't walk that line without some sacrifices and they seem to be going after the "average person" market in a lot of ways.

As it relates to freedom, Ubuntu is still open source and licensed under a free license. Technically it does qualify as being free software. The Amazon results may not be something a lot of us like (including myself) but anyone is free to remove that functionality from the OS.

If you choose an OS based on philosophy then I'm not sure that Ubuntu has been on your side for some years now. I don't agree that Ubuntu isn't freedom respecting but I do agree that it probably isn't for you and people like you.

They do ship binary blob drivers. I'm not against that, but for many free software advocates it is considered not 100% free.

You do realize Mint is making money off you too...right?

http://www.linuxmint.com/searchengines.php

Their (Mint's) modifications are much harder to disable as well. If privacy is a real concern use another distro like debian or arch or ... etc. but don't use Mint which has had questionable browser modifications for a long time.

The counterpoint of course is that with open source there can always be forked versions with egregious features removed.

If OS X decided to record all of your search results you'd be SOL.

With products where you pay for them in advance, you are the customer. So the companies making money off you tend to try and please you. In apple's case, sometimes they make decisions for the good of the user base, and those can annoy users with specific needs, but at the end of the day spying on their users is counter productive to being a profitable business.

With ad/search sponsored products ie. google and now canonical, the business has 2 customers. The consumer and the people they are selling ads to. And they aren't even making money off you directly, so it doesn't take much logic to work out where the balance of interests lie.

That's bullshit, because even if you pay for OS X, Apple can always decide that OS X needs to be sacrificed in favour of iOS.

And guess what. With iOS you're the product again, as the real customers are the mobile careers.

"With iOS you're the product again, as the real customers are the mobile careers."

Can you give an example?

Not really... pretty much every aspect of OS X is removable, it just isn't as straightforward as Ubuntu and may break portions of the system. You can remove Spotlight and Notification Center with ease, and I doubt it would be difficult to disable recording.

Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off.

> Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off.

Really? Wasn't Apple the one tracking iphone users wherever they went? [1]

I get the concern about Ubuntu sending data to amazon by default (i.e. can be disabled), I really do, but going out of the way to recommend something as proprietary as either Apple or Microsoft out of spite? This is what really bothers me about the OSS community. How about helping Mint/Fedora out and recommending them instead? I know some do, but even the OP here flaunted that an OSX recommendation seemed more viable than Ubuntu. As much as I would want not to be tracked, at least with Open Source SOFTWARE we can be more aware of it, or even have a say in it; not always so with proprietary stuff! So no, I do not believe either Windows or OSX are better than Ubuntu in this regard.

Not to mention that Canonical isn't a big company, so if they need help bootstrapping by doing some stuff with amazon for now, then so be it. I would hold off judgement on their actions until they're actually in a position of real financial power, cause right now it just seems they had to resort to such ad placement deals because the generous donations weren't cutting it. It's really not clear whether it's actually that big of a deal right now.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/20/iphone-trac...

Much of OSX is closed source. The only way you know it's not sending out your information is if you continuously monitor and analyse every packet leaving the machine.

With OS X you get no such guarantee (because the source is not widely available), with Ubuntu you do.

For example there is no "OS X Mint".

"I would even advocate for users to use other operating systems"

Wouldn't it make more sense to advocate for other Linux distributions?

I'm in exactly the same position, having switched to Ubuntu almost a decade ago.

There is just no way I can stick with a distro that a) abuses my privacy by selling my search strings by default, and without informing me, and b) thinks it is okay to sell advertising real-estate on my desktop in the first place.

For now I've switched to debian on my main machine, and am gradually migrating others.

Consider the flip side of the coin. The money from Amazon gives Canonical the ability to employ more developers, improve Ubuntu and add features faster, etc.

At the cost of privacy? No thanks, instead I will gladly donate to Canonical. Sending it to Amazon doesn't help either. Amazon is the Google of shopping. The more data they have, the better they can guess as to what you want. Search for X on Amazon while logged in and the next day you will receive an email recommending similar items. They have also admitted to storing your watching habits. Every play, pause, rewind and fast-forward is logged while watching a prime video. The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation.

> The higher the analytics, the better the recommendation.

Sure, in a concave down horizontal asymptote kind of way. My impression from things like the Netflix prize is that improving predictive accuracy for recommendations is an extremely high-cost, low-yield endeavor. I remember one day being shocked at the quality of Amazon's recommendations for me (since they'd always been crap), and looking to see how they'd picked such winners. The result? All of those products were ones I'd personally added to my old forgotten amazon wishlist.

The phrase you're looking is diminishing marginal returns. You hit the behavioral nail on the head with this analysis!

Well, sqrt(x) has diminishing marginal returns, but it's still unbounded. I'm pretty sure there's a hard limit to how good recommendations can get at all (think more like arctan(x)).

Why is it so terrible that Amazon know your shopping habits? Honest question. I've heard of cases where Amazon knew a woman was pregnant before her family and such things but I can't think of anything that would apply to most people that would be bad and come from Amazon knowing your shopping habits. Heck, even you yourself make a good case for why it's helpful for them to do so.

Sometimes I feel like people are against this as a matter of philosophy, knowing it'd be rare for it to have a negative effect on them. And I'm not saying that's bad or knocking it. I'm just trying to get a sense of why this is so distasteful. I've never seen an Amazon result when I search using the latest Ubuntu by the way. Then again, I'm only searching for applications or files on my machine. I've also never seen an ad on my desktop. I know these things exsits but don't know why I'm not seeing them.

> Why is it so terrible that Amazon know your shopping habits? Honest question... I can't think of anything that would apply to most people that would be bad and come from Amazon knowing your shopping habits.

I think you are putting the onus on the wrong party.

It's easy to imagine a scenario in which Amazon might be nefarious or incompetent with my data, or in which they may share my data with another party who is. However, I don't need to demonstrate that these scenarios are likely in order for me to desire privacy: If I am merely undecided about who I want to share my data with, then the rational thing for me to do is to not share my data.

To my mind, it seems immoral to release a product that shares search data by default and without notice.

> Sometimes I feel like people are against this as a matter of philosophy...

Absolutely. Are "matters of philosophy" a poor way to inform actions?

In my experience, you will enjoy life more if you think along the lines of "what's the worst that could happen?" Otherwise there's too many things to worry about or be unhappy about.

Amazon might even knowingly share some of your shopping habits with some organization you don't want them to, but what's the worst that could happen? Is it worse than the effort you'd put into ensuring that doesn't happen?

If you can't imagine anything bad happening, you lack imagination.

Assume Amazon will lose your data. Assume everyone else (facebook, twitter, g+, flickr) will lose your data, give them up -- or that they are already public.

Assume someone will correlate all that data, and sell it as a black market service to allow anyone to track you, see if you're in or out of your house, assume your government will put you on a no fly list if you're buying books on military tactics, left/right wing political opinion, assume your government will become oppressive in 15 years and mark up all your kids for "special attention" based on your shopping habits today etc etc...