Not really... pretty much every aspect of OS X is removable, it just isn't as straightforward as Ubuntu and may break portions of the system. You can remove Spotlight and Notification Center with ease, and I doubt it would be difficult to disable recording.
Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off.
> Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off.
Really? Wasn't Apple the one tracking iphone users wherever they went? [1]
I get the concern about Ubuntu sending data to amazon by default (i.e. can be disabled), I really do, but going out of the way to recommend something as proprietary as either Apple or Microsoft out of spite? This is what really bothers me about the OSS community. How about helping Mint/Fedora out and recommending them instead? I know some do, but even the OP here flaunted that an OSX recommendation seemed more viable than Ubuntu. As much as I would want not to be tracked, at least with Open Source SOFTWARE we can be more aware of it, or even have a say in it; not always so with proprietary stuff! So no, I do not believe either Windows or OSX are better than Ubuntu in this regard.
Not to mention that Canonical isn't a big company, so if they need help bootstrapping by doing some stuff with amazon for now, then so be it. I would hold off judgement on their actions until they're actually in a position of real financial power, cause right now it just seems they had to resort to such ad placement deals because the generous donations weren't cutting it. It's really not clear whether it's actually that big of a deal right now.
Much of OSX is closed source. The only way you know it's not sending out your information is if you continuously monitor and analyse every packet leaving the machine.
Although I highly doubt Apple would risk the backlash by putting a malicious feature like that in without an option to turn it off.