Richard Stallman has called out Ubuntu as being “spyware” because the operating system sends data to Ubuntu maker Canonical when a user searches the desktop. Stallman equates the Amazon search integration into the Ubuntu desktop as having installed surveillance code. The mere fact that Canonical chose to include malicious code in Ubuntu is damaging to the entire free software community, because users have come to expect that community oversight means free software won’t contain malware. Ubuntu allows users to switch the surveillance off, but Stallman says the existence of that switch does not make the surveillance feature OK.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/2012/12/ubuntu-linux-is-spyware.html