The point of the article is that by default PopCon sends absolutely nothing and I saw some articles acting like this is a removal of tracking people but they weren’t being tracked anyway without voluntary inclusion.
I think these articles about removing this “data collection” aimed at scaring people is very much misguided and is mostly “for clicks”.
Ubuntu 18.04 collects data about your PC’s hardware and software, which packages you have installed, and application crash reports, sending them all to Ubuntu’s servers. You can opt out of this data collection—but you have to do it in three separate places.
This linked article is quite flawed:
- the command it tells you to run to stop ubuntu-report is exactly the same thing that ubuntu-report does automatically if you just say no in the installer. . . .aka this is a pointless thing to tell people to do. It accomplishes nothing.
- removing popularity-contest is unnecessary because it doesn’t do anything by default
- apport is only sending crash reports which is a good thing if people expect them to fix anything.