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I am considering Ubuntu Server 18.04.2 LTS for a personal home server. Though, reading online about things like Zeitgeist and Unity Dash (Online Search Results) I became a bit concerned about privacy. As far as I understood, mentioned "tracking" features are included only in Ubuntu Desktop (not in Server version), nevertheless I am wondering:

  1. Are there some similar features (i.e. ones that will collect some kind of my personal data and send it to Canonical or anyone else, for that matter) included & enabled by default in Ubuntu Server 18.04.2 LTS.
  2. If so, how do I disable/uninstall those features?

1 Answers1

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The answer is no to your question. All the things you list are related to the desktop and are not related to the server edition.

There is one service connected to Canonical on a server. The service responsible for crash reports is apport. You can stop it with ...

sudo service apport stop

or just purge it

sudo apt purge apport

If so, how do I disable/uninstall those features?

The desktop has a "settings" where you can disable external communication and can set up relations with external provides (google mail and drive, amazon and others). All if them are opt-in.

I don't get your paranoia though.

If you are afraid of governments spying on you there is nothing you can do about that. They do that at the ISP itself.

The information shared with Canonical is not retraceable to you and is used to create user statistics pages. How else do we convince people Ubuntu is the best :)

Rinzwind
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    Also, by opting out of anonymous user metrics, it means that you aren't able to cast your vote for what features/bugfixes/etc YOU want developer time spent on (based on your usage patterns). So assuming that the metrics are totally anonymous (which, according to Canonical, they are), disabling these metrics only harms you! – Jon Jul 12 '19 at 18:52
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    Don't forget sudo apt purge ubuntu-report popularity-contest apport whoopsie to remove other telemetry garbage. – leetbacoon Jul 15 '19 at 11:42