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 Channel Futures

Open Source


"Multisearch" in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala Alpha: Privacy Concerns?

  • Written by Christopher Tozzi
  • August 14, 2009

If you thought using free software protected you from the privacy invasion and forced advertising that are often bundled with proprietary platforms, you may have thought wrong. Until recently, the alpha release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) sported a feature in Firefox called “Multisearch,” which modified Google searches in order to collect data about user behavior.  Here’s the story.

Beginning a couple of weeks ago, individuals testing the next release of Ubuntu, which will appear in stable form in October, found that performing a Google search from within the Firefox toolbar or from Ubuntu’s start page led to a custom results page with a modified interface.  A vague wiki entry about the new feature describes it as part of an “experiment” to collect data about user search habits and send them back to Ubuntu developers, ostensibly in order to “lead into work that can try to reduce the time spent when searching.”

This discovery prompted an angry response in bug reports and an Ubuntu forums thread, where developers were blasted for unilaterally implementing a feature with questionable consequences for user privacy.  Users were also upset that the custom search broke some Google features, like “I’m feeling lucky.”

The experiment ended suddenly on August 11, as quietly as it began.  But users remain in the dark, lacking any official communication from Canonical regarding the issue, or why developers thought it was a good idea.

Violating user trust?

The wiki page cited above promises that the “multisearch plugin will not exist in its current form in the final Ubuntu 9.10 release”; unfortunately, I’m unable to find a more official source corraborating that claim.

Nonetheless, I’ll give Canonical the benefit of the doubt that the experiment was truly aimed at finding ways to improve the Ubuntu user experience–and also, I suspect, generating some revenue by injecting advertisements into Firefox searches, which is fair enough as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of privacy and usability.

The way in which Ubuntu developers approached the test, however, is unacceptable.  The least they could have done is made the community aware of the feature’s presence, rather than taking advantage of unsuspecting users who test alpha releases by forcing this change upon them through an Ubuntu update.

The process behind the experiment should also have been much more transparent; as it is, developer responses to comments in bug reports are largely vague and condescending, and Alexander Sack’s promise of an official communication about the feature in a blog post or wiki page has yet to come to fruition.

For the time being, I’m chalking this fiasco up as one of the “bumps in the road,” as Canonical representative Jono Bacon put it, in a relationship between Canonical and the community that has generally been very positive and transparent.  But let’s hope a mistake like this isn’t made again.

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Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Open Source

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6 comments

  1. Avatar Simplicius August 15, 2009 @ 1:11 pm
    Reply

    They were experimenting with a new feature in an *alpha* version. People complained. They removed the feature promptly.

    What else do people expect? Sure, they might have done something better, but the outcry was way out of proportion.

  2. Avatar aikiwolfie August 15, 2009 @ 8:36 pm
    Reply

    That’s a bit of a shocking revelation. Canonical better not make too many mistakes like that. People who turn to Linux are generally educated enough to know there are alternatives. Which is how they ended up using Linux anyway.

    When market knows there is an alternative you can’t ever afford to violate it’s trust. Otherwise you just might find yourself being made redundant.

  3. Avatar McIvor August 18, 2009 @ 9:14 pm
    Reply

    I can’t believe how everyone panicked over this. What part of “This is research, it’s not a new feature” didn’t they understand? They explicitly said it wasn’t intended for release. Yeah, they should have mentioned it in the release notes for the alpha, but really, how do we ever expect anything to improve if we won’t let anyone start fixing things?

  4. Avatar Jay Forrest August 20, 2009 @ 9:36 pm
    Reply

    What we expect is communication and transparency from a Free and Open Source company and project. The issue is not the multisearch, the issue is doing something to our project without asking for letting us know. Ubuntu is suppose to be about community, and Linux is something you do with the community, not to the community. It is that feeling of it not being our distribution that is the problem. Once the community loses the feeling of ownership, the community will go elsewhere.

  5. Avatar The Gacko August 31, 2009 @ 8:25 pm
    Reply

    this has been in Ubuntu for a while. although not so much in the Firefox Search box but the default home page has always been a custom google search created by canonical. they use this to generate some revenue (ads through google etc).. same thing that firefox does itself through the search box.

    im not sure on what the custom google search tools google gives you but there is bound to be a way for the user/company to see what search terms were being put into the custom search they had setup.

    I cant see this as a biggy really

  6. Avatar ben2talk September 14, 2009 @ 12:15 pm
    Reply

    I agree with The Gacko – and to be honest, I tend to do all of my searches from the addressbar using keywords (gi or yi for google/yahoo images, gb for google and bing combined etc).

    I’ve been aware of Google’s tendency to be set as default for Firefox and Yahoo for Opera – and the first thing I do with these browsers is to set them up my way.

    It is, however, annoying that the default is a custom search page – though no biggie to reset this to a default speed dial page featuring a good selection of search engines.

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