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Comment by neilsimp1 | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, Ubuntu does send usage data to Canonical, unlike some other distros. Whether or not that counts as "spying" to you is another question.

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They only collect data of the installation process. Once installation is complete, no additional data is collected. They've even publicly released the results.

>The collected data is not-personally-identifiable. Meaning that a user cannot be singled out or tracked based on the data he/she provided. Here’s what Ubuntu collects

> Version and flavor of Ubuntu you’re installing

> Whether you have network connectivity at install time

> Hardware statistics such as CPU, RAM, GPU, etc

> Device manufacturer

> Country

> Installation time

> Whether you choose auto login, installing third-party codecs, downloading updates during install

> Disk layout

https://itsfoss.com/ubuntu-data-collection-stats/

Do they not also run popularity-contest to collect installation data on packages like Debian did? Or did they get rid of that?

No. We don't.

Debian's popularity contest is opt-in (not even installed unless you request it), and AFAIK has always been this way.

You can disable that very easily. And as far as I remember when I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 on my VM, it asked me whether I was ok with sending anonymous usage data (I believe the default choice was yes which is not ideal but was easy enough to turn off).

Even if you answer No, it will ping to their servers so that it can count users that did not want it. At least Canonical are honest about it and I'm sure you could at least prevent it with your firewall settings or maybe even by editing the hosts file.

This was my experience as well. That and the new "minimal install" option both jumped out at my when I set up my latest dev box.

I thought it asks you to opt-in when you install?

It asks you if you want to opt-out the default is enabled.

No, its opt out, default is yes.

Ah, lazy people like me dont even read... guess thats what theyre counting on.

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