Comment 88 for bug 402767

Thank you Jono for your kind assurances. I think people are all a bit anxious because of the looming
feature freeze in 2 weeks and how this has in the past affected controversial functionality that was
introduced close to the freeze date. I believe we are all aware, however, that Canonical has contributed
significantly to free software.

I believe that the majority of the people caring about this topic as much as I do essentially expect 4 things
for this to be called resolved:

1) A complete explanation on how much information is stored through the custom search. (*) (Thank you to Paul Sladen for clearly identifying the mechanism by which the search ratios are determined. I missed that the channel strings were different ;) )

2) Request for user consent at first launch or installation for any type of data mining / statistics collection and ability to remove said functionality then and there.

3) Simple removal (rather than disabling). And (I personally), the ability to make Mozilla, rather than Ubuntu, profit from searches (this should probably be extended to the Amazon search). Incidentally, I'm wondering what Mozilla's stance on this is given the branding.

4) feature-parity with a normal Google search (and the related improved layout)

(*) We are all aware that Google stores insane amounts of data (and some of us try to counteract this as much as possible) But I think we don't expect this kind of data mining from Ubuntu. (as there is talk of "revenue generation" in the future this is an important point): With respect to the usage tracking: are the relative frequencies related to the type of query in any way? Do you gain knowledge of search trends through the custom search? I think questions of this kind require clear exposition.