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Activist and free software guru Richard Stallman on Friday hammered Ubuntu for including what he termed spyware in new versions of the popular open-source operating system and urged GNU and Linuxusers to avoid the distribution.
In a lengthy article posted to the Free Software Foundation's website, Stallman decries the presence of an advertising search result pane in Ubuntu, which, he says, is a way to collect personal information from users. The Amazon pane, which is enabled by default, provides a separate category of search results, which are provided by the online retail giant, to users making general search queries from the Ubuntu desktop.
"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," Stallman writes.
The man contributed a lot to Free Software Foundation and he has a point.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2019178/stallman-slams-ubuntu-calls-amazon-integration-spyware.html