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[Jeremy Bicha <jbicha@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Northrup, I'm not responsible for the Unity design nor am I really
taking sides.

It's important to understand the Unity design if you want to influence
those that do make the decisions. The design as I understand is that you
should be able to open the Dash by either clicking the first button in
the top left or pressing the Super key and find whatever you'd want to
find. It should tell you the weather, it should give you movie results
(whether downloaded to your computer, available for purchase, or even
showing in movie theatres), apps (whether installed or not installed),
etc.

Fundamentally, that requires it to be a global search or universal
search which requires sending data across the Internet. Because that
design would generally be useful to average people and it is still
somewhat unique (although Google Now or Siri are similar in some ways),
it *will* be turned on by default. Since there is a fairly easy way to
opt out in System Settings>Privacy, it doesn't seem like there is any
actual action for Canonical or community developers to take on this bug.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1054776

Title:
  Don't include remote searches in the home lens

Status in “unity-lens-shopping” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Recent news (http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/09/online-shopping-
  features-arrive-in-ubuntu-12-10) indicates that the home lens will, by
  default, search Amazon for products to put in the 'More suggestions'
  section. This means that regular searches for local applications and
  files are transmitted to a remote server, which I believe breaks an
  expectation of privacy. It also seems somewhat tasteless for my
  operating system to be advertising things I might want to buy.
  Finally, the idea that Ubuntu is now ad-supported has brought
  considerable negative PR on tech news sites like Slashdot and Hacker
  News.

  All of these problems could be easily avoided if the shopping lens
  were separate, rather than showing results in the home lens.  The
  shopping results would still be very convenient when the user wanted
  to see them - they could opt in with a single click, as we currently
  can with the video lens, for example.

  To anticipate one likely response: I understand that this feature can
  be removed by uninstalling the package. I believe it should be opt-in,
  not opt-out, and I also think the feature is useful, so I don't want
  to remove it completely from my system.

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