Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman today called Ubuntu Linux "spyware" because the operating system sends data to Ubuntu maker Canonical when a user searches the desktop.

But his complaint is already falling on deaf ears—Canonical said today that it plans to increase use of the feature Stallman objects to in order to deliver expanded Internet search results in the next version of Ubuntu.

In Ubuntu 12.10, searching the Dash (the hub for finding stuff in the Unity desktop interface) for files and applications returns not only results from a user's desktop but also Amazon shopping results, as we reported in September before the operating system's release. If a user buys something from Amazon as a result, money is sent to Canonical in the form of affiliate payments.

User complaints forced Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth to defend the move on his blog, but the Amazon shopping results were implemented in Ubuntu 12.10 as scheduled. Stallman, the outspoken figure who started the free software movement, published his own take on the matter today, and he was just as critical as you'd expect.

"Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code," Stallman wrote in a post titled "Ubuntu Spyware: What to Do?" "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. … Ubuntu uses the information about searches to show the user ads to buy various things from Amazon. Amazon commits many wrongs (see http://stallman.org/amazon.html); by promoting Amazon, Canonical contributes to them. However, 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."

Canonical does provide an easy way to switch the search results off, as this screenshot from the Ubuntu settings shows:

But Stallman says that's not sufficient:

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. Even if it were disabled by default, the feature would still be dangerous: "opt in, once and for all" for a risky practice, where the risk varies depending on details, invites carelessness. To protect users' privacy, systems should make prudence easy: when a local search program has a network search feature, it should be up to the user to choose network search explicitly each time. This is easy: all it takes is to have separate buttons for network searches and local searches, as earlier versions of Ubuntu did. A network search feature should also inform the user clearly and concretely about who will get what personal information of hers, if and when she uses the feature.

Canonical doubles down

We asked Canonical for a response, and the company pointed us to a blog post that it published today. The post isn't a direct reply to Stallman—it talks about plans Canonical has to expand Internet search results in the Dash in Ubuntu 13.04, the next version of the OS.

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. "To achieve this, the Dash will call a new smart scope service which will return ranked online search results, which the Dash will then balance against local results to return the most relevant information to the user."

The goal "is to provide Ubuntu users the fastest, slickest way to find things right from their home environment—independent of whether those 'things' are on your machine, available online, free, or commercial."

Canonical says it can do this in a way that doesn't violate user privacy. "The data we collect is not user-identifiable (we automatically anonymize user logs and that information is never available to the teams delivering services to end users), we make users aware of what data will be collected and which third party services will be queried through a notice right in the Dash, and we only collect data that allows us to deliver a great search experience to Ubuntu users," Parrino wrote. "We also recognize that there is always a minority of users who prefer complete data protection, often choosing to avoid services like Google, Facebook, or Twitter for those reasons—and for those users, we have made it dead easy to switch the online search tools off with a simple toggle in settings."

Canonical is clearly in need of more funding—that's why it's asking users to donate money toward Ubuntu development when they download the OS. Canonical surely knew it would draw criticism for including Amazon search results in regular desktop searches, but it must have decided that enough users would like the feature and that it would bring in enough money to make it worth the criticism.

Stallman was never going to be a fan of Ubuntu, as it includes some repositories of non-free software. But the Amazon search results make things worse, he wrote. "Any excuse Canonical offers is inadequate," he wrote. "Even if it used all the money it gets from Amazon to develop free software, that can hardly overcome what free software will lose if it ceases to offer an effective way to avoid abuse of the users."

Stallman concluded with a plea that people who recommend or redistribute free operating systems "remove Ubuntu from the distros you recommend or redistribute." Ubuntu is still the most popular Linux distribution. While we suspect most "regular" users of Ubuntu will be satisfied with the on/off toggle for the online search results, there may well be a significant number who flee for an alternative distribution.

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