Wish I'd known that last weekend, I installed Ubuntu on a spare machine just to check it out since I haven't tried it in over a year. As soon as I saw Amazon ad's in my search I immediately wiped the machine and installed Mint. I didn't even think of the privacy issue, but it was just horribly annoying to have to weed through ad's to find what I was looking for. Totally not the direction we want any Linux distro to be going in. I found it quite offensive.
Although Mint is not without blame either, they promote search engines which pay them, but even this is not as bad as Ubuntu.