@Michael Scherer (misc-zarb) "Pushing this 6 months in the future mean they will have 6 months less of data to make it useful. From what I gathered, Canonical plan to have better results ( see Mark comment on OMG ubuntu ) and wish to improve the whole system, and for that, they need to gather lots of data. Canonical know what requests are made, but also see what links have been clicked."
It's not true that there is a binary choice between "no data/progress for 6 months" and "enable by default and tie into home lens in spite of privacy issues and community objections". Bug #1054785 proposes including the lens in the distro but not installing it by default. This bug only proposes separating it from the home lens and doesn't preclude installing it by default as a separate shopping lens. In both cases, interested folks could use the service, provide feedback on it, and Canonical could gather data to improve it. "If you look at the json output on http://productsearch.ubuntu.com//v1/search?q=windows , you see there is a unique identifier for each request, searching "sex" and "sex andersen" do give the same first result, with a different id. The id is the same if you do the same request, even from a different ip, so there is for now the minimal amount of tracking needed to improve the system, and that's not linked to a user profile." You simply can't infer tracking capabilities without access to the backend code and the full schema of data exchanged between Canonical and Amazon. IP addresses are minimally present for every request, and provide one (admittedly imperfect) identifier for tracking individual user behavior. At least for web-browsers, fingerprinting based on UA and other properties is common and highly effective (https://panopticlick.eff.org and there are ad-companies that admit to keeping browser fingerprint db's). Browser fingerprinting may or may not apply here, but the principle that ancillary request data can enable individual tracking in non-obvious scenarios absolutely applies. This is why bugs Bug #1054741 Bug #1054782 are important. Unless Canonical is public/explicit about what they collect and how they use it, it's just not possible to rule out individual tracking from the outside. "So yes, pushing this in FFE was kinda needed." I disagree that pushing FFE was needed at all (excepting that Mark Shuttleworth was driving the change and has the privilege to push FFE without justification). But even granting that an FFE-push of some kind is warranted: - Shopping lens doesn't need to be installed by default to reach interested users and generate data. - And it absolutely positively doesn't need to tie into home lens, which as one of the most frequently used components in the distro and a treasure trove of private information amplifies every other problem with this situation by several orders of magnitude. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1054776 Title: Don't include remote searches in the home lens To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-lens-shopping/+bug/1054776/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
