First of all, zeitgeist logs your activity using various sources on your computer to enable searching for recent documents, programs and activities. This is "spying" only for a very broad definition of "spying", and the data it gathers is never sent over the network.

Secondly, RMS refers to the "shopping" results in the dash, which have little to do with zeitgeist. This feature has been controversial, mainly because it's on by default, and because it operates from the "home" lens instead of from a dedicated lens - so one is always sending local search queries over the network when using the dash.

So if you have privacy concerns:

• To disable online results entirely in the dash, open the system menu (power-cog icon on the panel) > System Settings... > Privacy > Search results tab, and toggle the "Include online search results" switch to the OFF position.


• To only disable the Amazon results, you can uninstall the lens by opening a terminal and typing sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping. You will need to log out and back in for this to take effect.


• To effectively move the Amazon results to a separate lens, you can install an alternative implementation of the shopping lens by opening a terminal and typing sudo apt-add-repository ppa:markjtully/ppa, followed by sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install unity-lens-shopping-alternate, followed by sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping. You will need to log out and back in for this to take effect.


• To disable zeitgeist, open the system menu (power-cog icon on the panel) > System Settings... > Privacy, and toggle the "Record activity" switch at the bottom of the window to the OFF position.