Reading what he is talking about, Stallman's description is absolutely correct. If I am doing a desktop search for local files, it is not be expectation that that search will be transmitted to servers without my consent, and that it does so makes it spyware even if we don't also take into consideration that it is being done to track my interests for monetary gain in the form of referral links. Good on him for calling attention to this functionality.
This is also a strange plug - if I'm looking for something in my computer, how much chance any of Amazon shopping would be relevant? If I'm looking for a notes from last week's budget planning meetings, what would they show me, shopping results for "budget notebooks"? And they expect me to be happy with it? I understand Canonical needs to make money, and with free product it requires some creative thinking, but this one makes little sense to me.
> This means that "a search for 'The Beatles' is likely to
> trigger the Music and Video scopes, showing results that
> will contain local and online sources—with the online
> sources querying your personal cloud as well as other
> free and commercial sources like YouTube, Last.fm,
> Amazon, etc.," Canonical's Cristian Parrino wrote.
When I read that, I thought about entomologists...
This has been aired on another thread a day or so ago. Testing the 'feature' in Ubuntu 12.10 suggests that work has been done on making the response faster, and on making sure your whole query gets passed on.
I'm not sure I want all this noise when using a desktop. We shall see what it looks like when 13.04 lands.
I guess the idea is that, once you realise it searches Amazon, you go there when you are looking to buy something. I don't know if that will work, but it's more plausible than seeing something you want to buy while looking for a file.
It also makes more sense for music - search for an artist, and you can see the tracks you already own, followed by tracks available to buy with a single click.
People have tried this idea before and it's never gone down well. There were those old Safari search plugins that injected Amazon affiliate links into the results, or otherwise replaced existing ones with their own. That caused outrage.
The other thing is, I don't want my experience on Amazon to be modified by the things I type into my OS's search box, which I would expect to be private. What if, in a fit of loneliness, I search for my porn directory, then get a bunch of related items appearing on my Amazon front page?
The current set up has your search queries going to a server Canonical runs, which does anonymised searching of Amazon. I appreciate that's not that much better, but it does mean it won't affect your Amazon suggestions.
if they intend it for music that would disappoint even further. there are countless artists releasing free music, a free operating system should prefer that.
I'm sure they'd consider integrating a scope for a free music service. But the music that most people will be searching for is not (legally) free. And it's quite possible to support free software along with non-free music.
> Use Super-A. You can tell Unity exactly what you want to search. And in future you’ll be able to do that from the home lens, too, more easily than the current Lens Bar at the bottom of the Dash.
It sounds like they're working to expand the search functionality with users' best interests in mind, not adding advertisements as everyone seems to think.
> it is being done to track my interests for monetary gain in the form of referral links
They're just search results, not ads. Read the blog post from Shuttleworth.
Thanks. The article states "If a user buys something from Amazon as a result, money is sent to Canonical in the form of affiliate payments." Is the article in error, or has the behavior changed in response to criticism, or do the amazon links have Canonical affiliate codes?
The last seems to be the correct answer - affiliate links are used. I see no evidence Stallman is incorrect and the Shuttleworth blog article does not say they don't use affiliate links.
> The Amazon affiliate referral happens if you've arrived at the Amazon property via a 'tagged' link. Both links clicked via the dash which go to Amazon sites, and the shortcut in the launcher will add the tag. The tag adds a cookie which lasts for 24 hours. If you buy anything during that period, Canonical will get some affiliate revenue.
I'm actually not sure after reading both again -- Shuttleworth seems to imply that they're not doing this for money, but he doesn't explicitly say it.
Either way, these search results are distinctly different from the ads in the launcher that people were talking about a couple weeks ago, but everyone seems to be mixing the two up.
Both can be easily disabled, though. And searching your own machine is still an option.
I find it very hard to believe that anyone, let alone the presumably technologically proficient people at Canonical, would actually think that sponsored search results are useful. When was the last time anyone clicked a sponsored Google result?
I am not a fan of the somewhat common rhetoric that "ads are the new user valued content". If HP or Toshiba installed a browser tool bar into IE that gave them everything you searched for, nobody would question calling it spyware. And if it redirected your searches to some sleazy google proxy type site, i dont think anyone would hesitate calling that advertisement.
These aren't ads though, and Canonical isn't collecting this data with the intention of serving you ads -- they're just diplaying relevant Amazon results along with normal web results when you do a web search through the dash. It's also very easily disabled, and you still have the option of doing local searches confined to your machine.
Ok so when I'm searching for something on my computer I'm presented something other than the files I'm searching for right?
From Wikipedia:
"Advertising is a form of communication for marketing and used to encourage or persuade an audience (viewers, readers or listeners; sometimes a specific group) to continue or take some new action. Most commonly, the desired result is to drive consumer behavior with respect to a commercial offering, although political and ideological advertising is also common."
Sounds to me it's exactly the definition of advertising.
I agree with the sentiment, but the word "spyware" has always suggested subterfuge to me. It should be obvious to anyone running Ubuntu that if they're seeing Amazon links, then something's being transmitted to Amazon.
I don't agree with it, and I think it's the wrong move and certainly shouldn't be done without prior user consent, but let's not get hyperbolic.
By the first time they see the Amazon links, it is already too late, information they might have expected to be local and personal has already been transmitted to the Internet to be see by who-knows-who.
I don't agree with Stallman on everything, but I do feel increasingly uneasy with nearly all aspects of modern computing when it comes to privacy and so I support him in calling this sort of thing out.
But the same thing could be said for things like gmail. A person might assume that the mail messages they send are private but Google "reads" them and shows relevant ads next to your mail.
I'm not quite so presumptuous, especially knowing how many times Ubuntu has been mentioned in the past 5 years or so as a great option for peoples' parents and other less-technical people.
Part of the issue is that many users do not understand the concept of "local files". For example my mother when looking for papers for her class will do a search through the universities page find a paper. Because the online PDF viewer sucks I showed her how to download the file and open it in Adobe. Now when she needs the paper again dose she just goto downloads and open it up? No she goes through the whole search process again. Even if the window with the document is just minimized she will end up going though the whole search process to download another copy. I showed her how to search for documents on her computer which helped but she was confused why documents from the "internet" showed up sometimes. Now the more shocking thing she is apparently one of the goto computer people at the elementary school where she teaches.
Really this shouldn't be a shock to us anymore we have to realize that most people are very, very non-technical and easily confused. These features are designed for them, so they don't have to figure out which search box to use. Especially when you realize we are likely to be storing more stuff in the cloud because it's more available and reliable (how many redundant offsite-backups do you have of your data?), these features make sense. There are issues about how they are communicated so people aren't surprised but I feel these are reasonable attempts to improve a product.
Google Desktop (while it was still alive) was also spying on users in the same manner as you described above. I am not clear why there was no uproar about that?
Even if the search is remote the user must first be consented if his data is being sent anywhere else for any reason, like how IE doesn't send search terms for suggestons by default until the user clicks "Turn on suggestions (send keystrokes to bing)"
