"Our work is driven by a belief that software should be free and accessible to all." We can um and ah about what free and accessible means, but Mark Shuttleworth continues to push the goodwill of the community, testing where its breaking point might lie (see the new secret features development system, and Amazon ads/spyware built into Ubuntu 12.10). Hence, this "Bug #1" is just empty posturing that attempts to ride on the rapidly evaporating goodwill of the community.
I may not agree with all of the decisions Shuttleworth makes, but this is unfair. The "secret development process" is completely normal - people work on features for a while, but don't make them public until they're really good so that other people will be excited. What he's doing is offering to let other people into his secret process before he normally would.
Similarly, although it's true that Ubuntu by default sends your searches to Canonical, which then anonymizes them and sends them on to Amazon, it's also true that you can turn this off whenever you want. And that you have the ability to send your searches anywhere else you want, including your personally-owned index of products. And that Canonical has clearly stated that the Amazon lens is an example of a much larger class of things that they want to enable via the dash. So yes, sending all of your searches over the network by default is bad for privacy, but that doesn't make Ubuntu less free.
