1) I haven’t used it on desktop in some time, but not that far back they had Amazon ads in Gnome. Plus motd ads for Ubuntu stuff (like Pro, in fact). And now ads in apt output.
2) Spying is opt-in, to their credit, and only at install, so you just have to make sure you aren’t auto-piloting your way through the installation and enable it by accident, but that’s still another thing to worry about that may not exist in other distros. Not much of an issue in automated-deployment situations.
Doesn’t take much of that before it’s easier to just use a different distro.