I was testing Unity Shopping Lens on Ubuntu 12.10 Beta using Wireshark and so far my understanding looking at Amazon’s API and monitoring packets is that the Shopping Lens works something like below:
So despite what we have been told about no end-user information to include IP Addresses or queries going to Amazon it seems to some degree that is not correct as you can see in the below Wireshark Screenshot in addition to Canonical IP’s my system also is communicating with Amazon’s servers as I type queries into the dash as I explain above:
Anyway I can clearly see that my client does communicate with Amazon so I can say with little doubt that part is correct about how things occur once they get to alkes.canonical.com that is another question but considering Amazon’s API is pretty straightforward I would imagine this is pretty close to how the transactions occur.
Why don’t you look at the source code?
I have
Looks like we’ve reached the same conclusion at the same time! 🙂
https://perot.me/ubuntu-privacy-blunder-over-amazon-ads-continues
There’s a bug report about this issue here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity-lens-shopping/+bug/1055952
Thanks for the truth instead of the Canonical spin