Preserving privacy is one of the primary reasons that many turn to open-source software. Unfortunately, publicly available source code hasn’t stopped some apps from breaking their users’ trust. Here are some of the most high-profile worst offenses.
Ubuntu 12.10
The time Canonical added Amazon listings to your search results
In the mid-2000s, Ubuntu became the most well-known version of desktop Linux, attracting many due to its relative ease of use. But during the height of its popularity, the project also toyed with moves that many Linux users were uncomfortable with.
The biggest controversy came with the release of Ubuntu 12.10 in 2012, when Ubuntu’s parent company Canonical introduced Amazon store listings into the Unity Dash search results. If you tapped the Ubuntu icon at the top of your screen and began typing in search of apps or files, you would also see stuff you could buy from Amazon. In order to do this, what you typed had to be sent to Amazon’s servers, prompting sites like ours to tell you how to disable tracking in Ubuntu.
This way for Canonical to make money from affiliate links lasted for four years before eventually going away in Ubuntu 16.04. Unfortunately, the pre-installed Amazon web app would live on until Ubuntu 20.04.
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Kubuntu
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Kubuntu 24.04 LTS
When Android apps you trusted turned into ones you didn’t
For several years, I was a big fan of the Simple Mobile Tools apps suite on Android. Available on both F-Droid and the Play Store, these were apps providing open-source alternatives to most of the foundational software that ships on your phone. You could download a simple dialer, contacts, calculator, file manager, and many more. Each of these apps shared a similar design language, allowing you to make a functional phone out of a custom ROM or insert more privacy into a standard phone from your carrier.
Then the developer sold the apps to ZipApps, which then immediately injected ads into some of the software. The Simple Mobile Tools apps are still available from the Play Store, but thankfully someone has stepped up to continue where Simple Mobile Tools left off. The Fossify project forked all the original apps and has continued development. You can find all of these new apps in the Play Store and on F-Droid as well.
Audacity
When the idea of adding telemetry was a bridge too far
Audacity has long been one of the go-to audio editing tools for Linux users looking to create their own podcasts or edit music. It’s one of those free and open-source programs that has achieved so much mainstream success that, despite its prominence in the Linux community, Linux represents a minority of Audacity users. The app has been downloaded well over 100 million times. I first used Audacity on Windows XP in high school, years before I eventually downloaded Ubuntu and became one of many hooked on distro hopping.
In 2021, Cypriot company Muse Group, owners of Ultimate Guitar and MuseScore, purchased Audacity. The company then announced plans to incorporate telemetry into Audacity. That was enough to stir up substantial backlash from the Audacity community, with some going far enough to fork the project. While Muse Group quickly back-peddled and abandoned plans for telemetry, forks like Tenacity still remain.
Mozilla Firefox
Telemetry, Google search by default, closed-source features, built-in AI, and on and on
In the era before Google Chrome, back when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer reigned supreme, Mozilla’s Firefox browser rose to prominence as the most viable alternative. It was successful enough that, when I was in high school, Firefox was installed on the desktops in our computer lab. If there were two apps I knew were on my friends’ computers, they were Firefox and AOL Instant Messenger.
Firefox doesn’t have as many users as it once did, but it remains the largest open source browser that isn’t owned by a corporation. Mozilla advocates for an open web and is the defacto default browser on the Linux desktop. For that reason, there has been ongoing frustration with the many times Mozilla has made changes to Firefox that, while par for the course for proprietary software, are difficult for free software enthusiasts to swallow.
Firefox, for example, already comes with telemetry enabled by default. Mozilla failed to deliver on promises to open source Pocket, the read-it-later service that the non-profit has since canceled. We also can’t forget the reality that Firefox’s default search engine is Google, not DuckDuckGo or a more private alternative. And, of course, there are all the ways Mozilla has sought to integrate AI.
Having open source code is usually a sign that software can be trusted—in a sense, the developer is openly saying they have nothing to hide. But sometimes users can be tracked in plain sight. Other times, software that was birthed by trustworthy people eventually changes hands. While, for the most part, you can trust open source software, it still doesn’t hurt to check the app settings or app store details from time to time.
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