The Dash Is Now Anonymized In Ubuntu 13.10 183
Last year, Canonical drew heat for the troublesome privacy implications that people like Richard Stallman saw in its in-built search-and-shopping facilities. An anonymous reader now writes "Long story short — Canonical now makes the user's data anonymous."
Piss Poor Submission (Score:5, Interesting)
There may, or may not, be a story here. But, the submission is from someone who seems to not have mastered the English language, in which it is written, and therefore it makes little or no sense at all. The submisison is completely worthless.
Whether or not Ubuntu has restored any semblance of privacy to the desktop search remains an exercise for the reader. But, I can't be bothered. Ubuntu has broken my trust and I won't be arsed enough to see if they have chosen to change, a little bit, for now. There are still several Linux distributions that still lack the phone home and spyware trojans that Ubuntu has chosen to use.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Interesting)
Anonymity != Privacy because we're in the age of big data [post-gazette.com] where large data sets can be cross-correlated to profile an individual. From stores that track your cell phone [foxbusiness.com] while you're shopping to big chain stores figuring out you're pregnant [nytimes.com], big data techniques are invading your privacy in more and more ways. If you think that anonymous data collection is safe, it's still data collection and despite people's best efforts, we are of course creatures of habit and your repetitive habits allow people to build fingerprints about you. If you have enough data points, even anonymous data points, you can build a profile of an individual, their habits, their likes, their dislikes and where they go on the Internet. If you can take that profile and match it against an individual using other correlating data you've been identified. This has been proven for example in the 2007 Netflix prize competition where anonymous movie reviewers were tracked down. [utexas.edu] There's lots of examples on this and over the past few years, techniques have become much better at picking individuals out of anonymous data sets. [wired.com]
More chilling is a study released this year [mit.edu] showed that using in analyzing anonymous cell phone tracking data, 95% of 1.5 million individuals could be identified.
What this means that as long as companies are able to collect data about you, whether tagged or anonymous, you're still being tracked somewhere and that is no guarantee that your privacy is protected. What has to happen to provide privacy is to stop all of the tracking and I don't see companies nor governments giving up that mechanism anytime soon.
Ubuntu is a has-been. (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to run 40+ Ubuntu clients. Unfortunately, Cannonical has added so many new features: Zeitgeist, Mono, Amazon monitoring, Unity, UEFI, MIR, etc. that most of the community left. Their Distrowatch ratings have been plummeting since the glory days of 10.4.
Although the desktop flavor of the month is Mint (an Ubuntu fork) right now, a lot of the crapware is removed, and much of the progress is going back to Debian. I am grateful for the investment by the Benevolent Dictator for Life (Mark Shuttleworth), and the progress that Linux has made because of Cannonical's work. That being said, there is an adage in the Linux user space:
"How do you become a millionaire selling open source software? Start out as a billionaire."
The profit model is broken for Cannonical. It is sad to see it wither.
Eh... (Score:3, Interesting)
Smart users rip it out ASAP. Smarter users dont use ubuntu and use Mint or another version where they actually care about the user.