I understand Canonicals intentions: with everything going "cloud" and "online" it makes total sense to offer just one search box instead of two. It's easy, it's convenient.
However it sends your input to a third party or maybe parties in the future. You no longer control your data. Is it even encrypted? Who can see what you are searching? Your family, your provider, everybody on your wifi?
It's not about ads in the first place, it's about data protection, trust and user interfaces.
However this isn't Ubunut, this is just Canonical Unity. I'd just install gnome-shell/kde/xfce/... and be done with it.
I love Ubuntu. Been a fan from, lets see, 5.04. It's been a long sweet experience. But lately I've got many areas which I vehemently disagree with them.
I guess the most important issue with Ubuntu nowadays is the one of privacy. With the recent revelations of mass surveillance, exposing desktop searches to a 3rd party by default is a catastrophic decision. I can't understand how the folks at Canonical could accept such a feature. They could have made it opt-in, with flashing popups and shit, asking you to signup. But making it default is a nightmarish situation. I was able to recommend non-technical users (like my parents and relatives) to install Ubuntu by themselves, arguing there was nothing to change that would need someone with know-how. But not now with stuff like this. I don't think the major chunk of the user-base (home users), would understand the implications of this feature.
You can call it a key logger, and I understand why you would object, but sending search terms typed into a search box to a search engine is pretty much what people expect. Ubuntu does it. GNOME does it. Android does it. iOS does it. OS X does it. Windows is very nearly the last one to do it.
Privacy is important, and I don't think either I or David Tomaschik would ever argue otherwise, and there should definitely be an opt-out, but I think there are more serious problems with Windows that would be more worth objecting to than searching the Web from a search box.
I hear so many people talking about this like there's literally no way about going around these issues.
Is it that unimaginable to use an alternative search engine like DuckDuck go? To use tor? To use a VPN? To disable javascript? To block ads? To put some IPs in your /etc/hosts? To use OpenOffice instead of Google Docs and MS Office? To use Proton Mail instead of Gmail?
These products even have nice user interfaces these days! Privacy isn't that hard. These companies offer a service for free (mostly). If you can't do it, I think it's mostly because you just don't care.
My concern was that if I wanted to buy something, I'd go online and look for it. If I wanted to run an application, I'd search for it. It was a case of extremely terrible UX and wasted my time having to disable it each time I installed Ubuntu.
I actually don't see the difference between Ubuntu's Amazon search bar and a crapware browser toolbar.
In both cases, there are some defenses for it: it's not a terribly big problem, the developer can rationalize it in terms of obscure use cases where someone might actually want to use it, and you can always disable it once you realize it's there.
But in both cases, it's making your computer perform worse, showing you things you never asked for, and possibly breaking your expectations of privacy, just so that the developer can make a trickle of money from you.
Just wondering how many people have actually installed Bing Desktop, Google Desktop or any other desktop search on Windows. Why does Ubuntu think their more discriminating user base need these SMART search features when the common John and Jane shunned it?
It's all about privacy and companies trying to get you to buy more things are the worst offenders of viruses and invasion of privacy on the web.
Yup, it's easy to remove that specific functionality. But let's think of the big picture. The introduction of this privacy-violating functionality signifies the direction of Ubuntu as a whole.
...what paranoia are you talking about? The data-slurping defaults are there, that's a fact. They are also (during the installation) hidden under a small link that barely looks like a link at all (not to mention the process necessary to make a local account). When a device is doing local search, there is absolutely no reason to phone anywhere other than sloppy design or more data-slurping.
Additionally, the worst thing is that the average Joe probably won't even notice all those obfuscated settings. Of course a power-user can disable most of it, but it's not about them and that shouldn't be a thing to begin with, especially in a paid software where we are supposed to be the customers.
And use what alternative? Google, Apple, Facebook? Ubuntu cloud? Really? Is our data more save at Ubuntu services? You seem to be under the wrong impression that it's a problem we can solve by avoiding products of one company. As long as we're dealing with companies we're dealing with issues like that regardless of the image these companies try to create.
Use the internet as it was a public place. Remeber you can't even trust ssl connections (see Apple by mistake, NSA by purpose).
I mean, isn't this a bit like saying, "I left Windows for Ubuntu because of the invasive privacy concerns I had... But man Unity is terrible, I'm going back to Windows!"
If privacy is the ultimate concern, I can suffer usability.
I think the real issue is we've stopped advocating for privacy loudly and publicly. All the users know is convenience.
While it may be interesting from an ease of use point of view, I'm worried it is actually more of move from Google and Microsoft to get more lock-in on their OS and of the web.
I think the main concern over this is that it's bakedintotheOS. That's a significant difference from "Here's a 3rd party app you can install if you want this functionality." Especially from an OS vendor who (a) dominates the desktop market, and (b) absolutely loves to hide or obfuscate the ability to disable such features (which are often enabled by default).
You just killed your project. Nobody is going to use a security centric product littered with ads. Ads are exactly what people should be worried about, tracking their tabs and browsing activities.
The thing is, I wanted to use an open source OS that doesn't track me. I understand that to be able to use certain services on top I must accept closed source software and the privacy issues but that's a trade off I'm happy to make. My phone pinging some server every 5 minutes with my location and to download more ads doesn't benefit me however.
You mean instead of being able to download and run something natively at my convenience, I have to run it on (barf) JavaScript in the browser? I have to submit to being tracked everywhere I go online, and send my data to a central "cloud" where advertisers can profit from it freely without paying me royalties?
I don't want this, I wouldn't use this. I guess I'm just not optimistic enough to see this work:
Flatpak, snap, etc don't work as they just try to make the current desktop philosophy secure, without the application and the rest of the OS really being aware of it. Android and ios have been designed to offer native features for fine grained access control and isolation. For a desktop os, you need the same, from the ground up, and every app needs to be tailored to this. You'll start with a desert and tumbleweed.
This will never work, because it's simply too late: The web. A Chromebook pretty much does all the isolation you want on a different level, and is enough for the vast majority of people. I know you can now list a thousand things you cannot do in a browser and whatnot, but consider that the folks here on HN are a very rare breed.
And again, as you even said, for such a hypothetical sndboxing desktop os, user space needs to be rebuilt in large parts from scratch. Not in a hundred years. There so many things that are still lacking on the linux desktop today that this would at best be yet another experimental toy OS with no real world usability.
For me it's simply two separate, physical machines, one for online banking and sensitive stuff, the other for dev work, games, goofing off, and one or two android devices for other random crap. That's my sandboxing.
Apps not built to be searchable are 100% of native apps, so any web apps that are searchable are a win, as far as internetworking goes.
Regardless, this feels both conspiratorially couched (when simple bland Occam's Razors issues of these being necessary massification as a couple billion people all login). These complex issues don't feel like censorship today. The information has a harder time competing to get out but if you have a network of people who listen to you you will have fairly unimpeded channels in almost every place on earth.
You're also standing on authority with 'trust me' & I don't have any known reasons I would trust you.
The answer is yes, people who use shit like google/facebook is being spied.
The problem is, traditionally, people who used Linux know how to deal with these things (eg: use StartPage instead of google, use a shared IP, etc). But having to fight your own distro of choice is a different matter. This shouldn't be happening. As much as I loved Ubuntu, now I'm already testing other distros to make the switch.
However it sends your input to a third party or maybe parties in the future. You no longer control your data. Is it even encrypted? Who can see what you are searching? Your family, your provider, everybody on your wifi?
It's not about ads in the first place, it's about data protection, trust and user interfaces.
However this isn't Ubunut, this is just Canonical Unity. I'd just install gnome-shell/kde/xfce/... and be done with it.
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