Comment 168 for bug 1054776

I'm quite surprised this issue has not been taken care of by now. When it first surfaced I almost ignored it because I thought for sure enough noise will be made to reverse this decision. I fully understand the business side of it, but it really is far from logical when you look at it from the end user point of view. To date, approximately 0 people I know personally have considered the Amazon integration to be a good thing. Oddly enough, most find it weird, intrusive, or scary to have on the system by default. I've installed Ubuntu on countless machines for people, and everyone has contacted me wondering how the computer is magically showing them relevant shopping searches. To most people, it's scary. It's not helpful, it's downright scary. If this would be an option that the user would need to enable, it'd be a totally different story because then the user knows it's there and the user knows what to expect as a result. In a world where malware is a common practice it stands to good reason that even your most computer illiterate grandma out there would be nervous about how a computer knows so much about what you just typed in. Once you take a step back and look at this situation without any degree of bias or with some sort of business related underlying agenda, you'll see that, guaranteed.

By default, I disable the privacy and shopping integration as a first step when I install Ubuntu. I find that I'm downright angry each time I do it, because I know, deep down, it's not right. It's. Just. Not. Right. Having this enabled by default is just foolish and I am beyond disgusted with the fact that it's here by default.

But wait... there's a catch... I've been an Ubuntu user since 2006, and I have tried countless other distributions but each time I come back to Ubuntu. I love what Canonical is doing and I love how Ubuntu is shaping up to be such a fantastic and easy to use (yet crazy powerful) distribution. In the event that this option was disabled by default, I would actually go out of my way to enable it. Yeah - not joking here. I work in IT, so I'm continually having to purchase various parts for systems. Amazon is, ironically, my first (and usually my only) stop to finding what I need. In the event that this was disabled by default I would put forth the effort to support Canonical and Ubuntu by ensuring that each purchase I made I would do so via the Unity dash. But considering that it's enabled by default, I find myself so incredibly disgusted that I find it's difficult to even use Ubuntu any more. I can't help but to wonder "what's next" on the agenda if things like this are going to be baked into the operating system from the get-go. Fortunately, there are other distributions that don't have "features" like this enabled, which are becoming all too attractive with each passing day...

I know I'm just one person, so clearly I understand that what I just said will hardly be persuasive. Instead, I'll let the masses do the talking. As a frequent user of the UbuntuForums, AskUbuntu, and the Ubuntu IRC channels, I have yet to find a single end user who has said "This was a good idea." That's not an exaggeration - that's a straight up fact based entirely on my personal experience with these contact channels. I have yet to see anybody blatantly support this. Instead it's done nothing more than raise a substantial level of concern and distrust. That should be eye opening for you folks, but so far, it's been simply ignored. Upon 13.04's release today, countless web sites have popped up with articles entitled "First 10 things to after you install Ubuntu 13.04." There again, on every single one I've found, "disable the shopping lens" is listed. But I'm sure that too will fall on deaf or uncaring ears.

As a one liner summary, we are sick of just being "okay" with disabling the shopping lens. This should be disabled by default. Period.