Yes, Ubuntu had something called the "amazon search lens" which was easily removed with a command-line like "sudo apt-get remove amazon-search-lens". It pissed off a lot of people though, and a bunch simply moved to a competing distro, such as Mint. This was pretty easy since Mint is derived from Ubuntu (but without the UI stuff). Canonical finally relented and removed the offending software.
See, this is why competition is so nice. With Linux, it's fairly easy to jump ship and move to a competing distro at any time. I can do it in under an hour. (It helps keeping your user data on a separate partition from the rest of the OS.) It's really easy when you stay within the same "camp" of distros, so there's little learning curve: the Debian/dpkg distros are somewhat different from the Redhat/Fedora/RPM distros, but within those camps they're extremely similar. Even switching between those camps isn't that hard. One distro pisses you off? No problem, just go download one of its sister distros and install. Try that with Windows. And if you'd rather stick with your distro but make a change, this is comparatively easy since the system is open-source and put together in a transparent way. Like the Amazon search lens above: it wasn't baked deeply into the system in an opaque way, it was a separate dpkg package. It's easy to look at package contents for system components like this, see any dependencies, and uninstall them if you don't like them. You can even take out large parts of the system (like the UI) and replace them with something entirely different, which is exactly what Linux Mint does, using Ubuntu's base packages, omitting Ubuntu's "Unity" DE, and sticking your choice of 4 different desktop environments on top.
See, this is why competition is so nice. With Linux, it's fairly easy to jump ship and move to a competing distro at any time. I can do it in under an hour. (It helps keeping your user data on a separate partition from the rest of the OS.) It's really easy when you stay within the same "camp" of distros, so there's little learning curve: the Debian/dpkg distros are somewhat different from the Redhat/Fedora/RPM distros, but within those camps they're extremely similar. Even switching between those camps isn't that hard. One distro pisses you off? No problem, just go download one of its sister distros and install. Try that with Windows. And if you'd rather stick with your distro but make a change, this is comparatively easy since the system is open-source and put together in a transparent way. Like the Amazon search lens above: it wasn't baked deeply into the system in an opaque way, it was a separate dpkg package. It's easy to look at package contents for system components like this, see any dependencies, and uninstall them if you don't like them. You can even take out large parts of the system (like the UI) and replace them with something entirely different, which is exactly what Linux Mint does, using Ubuntu's base packages, omitting Ubuntu's "Unity" DE, and sticking your choice of 4 different desktop environments on top.