Canonical

Canonical is software company best known for creating Ubuntu. It is largely funded by South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth.

Upstreaming

Alongside Red Hat and Google, Canonical makes up a substantial portion of upstream security patches in the Linux ecosystem. They maintain AppArmor^[1], a Linux security system that proactively manages threats, Snap^[2], a Linux appstore with sandbox support, and Livepatch^[3], a system to patch the Linux kernel without needing to reboot.

Tracking

Canonical is collecting user telemetry from Snap^[4], which is shipped by default in Ubuntu^[5].

Previously, Canonical sent local file search queries to their own servers, which were used to recommend ads on Amazon^[6]. In 2014, this feature was removed^[7].

In 2018, telemetry tracking for hardware components, software configuration, and crashes has been added in an opt-out ^[8] model.

References

[1] ttps://apparmor.net/

[2] ttps://snapcraft.io/

[3] ttps://docs.kernel.org/livepatch/livepatch.html

[4] ttps://snapcraft.io/docs/snap-store-metrics

[5] ttps://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snap-on-ubuntu

[6] ttps://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do

[7] ttps://www.pcworld.com/article/436097/ubuntus-unity-8-desktop-removes-the-amazon-search-spyware.html

[8] ttps://superuser.com/questions/1311588/how-to-opt-out-usage-data-collection-in-ubuntu-18-04-bionic

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