Or, you know,

    sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

But the point is the fact that Canonical made the decision to enable this by default breaks my trust in them. What are they going to do next? How am I going to monitor to make sure I know what I need to remove/disable/opt-out of next? If I choose an Ubuntu variant how do I monitor them to check that they aren't adding any of the parent undesirable features.

That is why when I decide to change from 12.04 it will almost certainly be to another distro. Maybe I need to give the parent distro a try (Debian).

Or just remove anything from Unity and install Gnome Shell. I do this. My laptop runs a Ubuntu which is, interface-wise, a Debian with faster updates.

I agree, but see my comment from elsewhere in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4890445

This is true. However, as you can see from my screenshot, I'm using Chrome, so all my information is getting collected by Google anyway ;/

I wish I could just run the last version of Ubuntu whose version of GDM supported complete theming, but still get security and feature updates.

I love xubuntu, it's like how Ubuntu was before they decided that flash was more important than function.