This really disappointed me but Ubuntu is collecting information on everything you search on the Desktop. Well, I use and I love Ubuntu. So I will still continue using it but had already disabled that feature. Did you? See details on the post from the Hacker News bellow:
Creator of the GNU Project & Free Software Foundation’s Leader Richard Stallman has called out Ubuntu as being “spyware”.
He said, “Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical’s servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.)“
Stallman’s post, “The ads are not the core of the problem,” “The main issue is the spying. Canonical says it does not tell Amazon who searched for what. However, it is just as bad for Canonical to collect your personal information as it would have been for Amazon to collect it.“
According to Stallman, the mere fact that Canonical chose to include malicious code in Ubuntu is damaging to the entire free software community, because users have come to expect that community oversight means free software won’t contain malware.
Ubuntu allows users to switch the surveillance off. Clearly Canonical thinks that many Ubuntu users will leave this setting in the default state (on) and many may do so, because it doesn’t occur to them to try to do anything about it. Thus, the existence of that switch does not make the surveillance feature OK.
Mohit Kumar aka ‘Unix Root‘ is Founder and Editor-in-chief of ‘The Hacker News‘. He is a Security Researcher and Analyst, with experience in various aspects of Information Security. His editorials always get people thinking and participating in the new and exciting world of cyber security. Other than this : He is an Internet Activist, Strong supporter of Anonymous & Wikileaks. His all efforts are to make internet more Secure. Follow him @ Twitter | LinkedIn | Google | Email
