Ubuntu collects information from your system including hardware and software and sends them to Ubuntu servers. The data includes the information about the packages you have installed, how you are using it, and the applications crash reports.
You may be wondering “Should Ubuntu users be able to see their system STATS?”
Thankfully for my nerves (and no doubt the bods over at Canonical HQ) the majority of Ubuntu users are okay with the stated aims — a bit of anonymous system stat profiling isn’t a major cause for concern, tbh — plus we’re told the metrics will help improve Ubuntu. Even better: Canonical publishes the results of the survey online for anyone to see.
A frequent query we ran across in our research was “How many Ubuntu users opt to share their data?”.
The report does provide some interesting insights into how people use Ubuntu and what kind of configuration they opt for their Ubuntu install. 67% of Ubuntu 18.04 ‘opted’ to share their data. I deliberately used quotes on opted here because data sharing is opt-in by default.
Does Ubuntu use cookies to track usages?
As far as I know Ubuntu is using a process to track user usages and maybe personal information, some like google and other websites use cookies to provide you with “more suitable add”. Can someone tell the name of the process and how to stop it ?
Ubuntu does have services for monitoring systems like Landscape that is intended for Enterprise usage, or for a savy individual with many Ubuntu systems and not really for Canonical/Ubuntu Community.
Ubuntu allows users to switch the surveillance off. Clearly Canonical thinks that many Ubuntu users will leave this setting in the default state (on). And many may do so, because it doesn’t occur to them to try to do anything about it. Thus, the existence of that switch does not make the surveillance feature ok.
What does Ubuntu 18 04 collect?
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.
What is Ubuntu report and what does it do?
, and sorry, what?! We were the first to report on Ubuntu’s plans to gather system metrics in new installs of 18.04 LTS onwards.
Does ubuntu spy?
The answer is no. Linux in its vanilla form does not spy on its users. However people have used the Linux kernel in certain distributions that is known to spy on its users. What to do after installing Ubuntu ?
How does Ubuntu spy on You?
When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical’s servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.) This is just like the first surveillance practice I learned about in Windows.
Is there any spyware on Ubuntu?
As spyware can be for any OS, and aren’t so evident in Linux distros because of increased security and smaller market share, they certainly exist. Even if there is no information on spyware for ubuntu available, your ‘someone you know’ could have written it themselves.
My answer was since Ubuntu version 16.04, the spyware search facility is now disabled by default. It appears that the campaign of pressure launched by this article has been partly successful. Nonetheless, offering the spyware search facility as an option is still a problem, as explained below.