Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, the Ubuntu community is not pleased with the Shopping Lens that provides Amazon content, implemented on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr Unity 7 by default, from privacy reasons.
Canonical has found a fix for that, now all the users’ queries go through a Canonical server and get anonymized. The shopping lens comes enabled by default on Ubuntu 14.04, but you can easily deactivate it, by pasting the below oneliner in your terminal:
gsettings set com.canonical.Unity.Lenses disabled-scopes "['more_suggestions-amazon.scope', 'more_suggestions-u1ms.scope', 'more_suggestions-populartracks.scope', 'music-musicstore.scope', 'more_suggestions-ebay.scope', 'more_suggestions-ubuntushop.scope', 'more_suggestions-skimlinks.scope']"
The oneliner does not uninstall anything, it just disables the Amazon, Ebay, Music Store, Popular Tracks Online, Skimlinks, Ubuntu and Ubuntu One Music Search Shop in the Smart Scopes.
But starting with Unity 8, the online search will not be enabled by default anymore. Canonical is now working at an online search scope for Unity 8 and will port it also to the desktop version of Unity 8, when it will be ready. But it will not be enabled by default, due to the fact that the scopes need to be activated by the users.
This is what Michael Hall said on Google+:
“The default scope (Applications) won’t return Amazon results. The Scopes scope might return the Amazon scope in response to a query, but it won’t return Amazon results. The Scopes scope will send your query info to Canonical (as far as I understand it). Only searching in the Amazon scope itself will return Amazon results (it’s not clear to me if these queries will still be anonymized through Canonical servers),”