It is a violation of your privacy that you may have already agreed to - presumably MS mentions this in their ToS/privacy policy that this information will be shared. They just conveniently forget to remind you that when you deploy a VM...
Another interesting question: aren't you a direct customer of Canonical here? When you buy stuff off of any marketplace or though a reseller, it seems to me you are a customer for multiple companies. Examples: buying an iPhone from AT&T, buying a laptop from Amazon, buying a Subaru through a dealer.
I think there's a difference here; you can get Ubuntu got free outside of Azure without being a customer of Canonical, but you can't get an iPhone from Apple for free from them just by going through a different channel
I think I'm missing something... Ubuntu is developed by Canonical, right? Just because you do not pay for it when you get it outside of Azure does not mean you are not their customer?
Doesn't customer imply a paying relationship? If I put some code online and let people use my software I'd say that makes them at most my users, not consumers.
When you get it a certain way through Azure you both enter a contractual agreement with each other, and that does make you a customer.
I think requiring payment is a bit too strict requirement to define a customer. Your users still agree to your license, so there is a relationship established, you may just not get any benefit from it (monetary or otherwise). Even in your license you likely have to be explicit that "software is provided as-is" and you aren't responsible for it misbehaving - otherwise your customers/users could try to sue you. Just because you don't pay for Ubuntu doesn't mean Canonical does not get anything out of you deploying it. Do they gather any kind of data about users' behavior?
Another interesting question: aren't you a direct customer of Canonical here? When you buy stuff off of any marketplace or though a reseller, it seems to me you are a customer for multiple companies. Examples: buying an iPhone from AT&T, buying a laptop from Amazon, buying a Subaru through a dealer.