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How to help stop Ubuntu spying on you.

Some very useful tips for blocking some information gathering services on Ubuntu. This is very useful if you are worried about security with all of these services sending data to Canonical.

Ubuntu-report – sends hardware information to Canonical. Turn this off easily.

4.4 Thu Nov 29 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ ubuntu-report -f send no

Block access to metrics.ubuntu.com in your hosts file, or on your router.

Popularity-contest – sends software information to Canonical. Just purge the packages and it will be no more.

4.4 Thu Nov 29 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ sudo apt purge popularity-contest
1) All commands run with root privileges are always dangerous.
2) Never run commands on an environment you are not willing to destroy, or able to restore.
3) Do not become root until you know what you are going to do.
4) Be sure of your command and what is going to be affected by it.
[sudo] password for jason: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  popularity-contest* ubuntu-standard*
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 2 to remove and 131 not to upgrade.
After this operation, 169 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
(Reading database ... 471945 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing ubuntu-standard (1.417) ...
Removing popularity-contest (1.66ubuntu1) ...
Processing triggers for man-db (2.8.3-2ubuntu0.1) ...
(Reading database ... 471918 files and directories currently installed.)
Purging configuration files for popularity-contest (1.66ubuntu1) ...

Whoopsie – can send crash reports – connects to canonical servers at boot.

4.4 Thu Nov 29 jason@Yog-Sothoth 0: $ sudo apt purge whoopsie
1) All commands run with root privileges are always dangerous.
2) Never run commands on an environment you are not willing to destroy, or able to restore.
3) Do not become root until you know what you are going to do.
4) Be sure of your command and what is going to be affected by it.
[sudo] password for jason: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  whoopsie*
0 to upgrade, 0 to newly install, 1 to remove and 131 not to upgrade.
After this operation, 100 kB disk space will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
(Reading database ... 471917 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing whoopsie (0.2.62) ...
(Reading database ... 471911 files and directories currently installed.)
Purging configuration files for whoopsie (0.2.62) ...
dpkg: warning: while removing whoopsie, directory '/var/lib/whoopsie' not empty so not removed
Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-20) ...
ureadahead will be reprofiled on next reboot
Processing triggers for systemd (237-3ubuntu10.9) ...

The 50-motd-news service – sends informations, receives motd news/ads. Set ENABLED=0 in /etc/default/motd-news.

The geoclue/geoip service. – connects to canonical servers at boot. Run this command to disable it.

gsettings set com.ubuntu.geoip geoip-url ""

Lightdm – pings uccs.landscape.canonical.com at login. Set Servers = in /etc/remote-login-service.conf

These tips will make your Ubuntu system a little safer online if you do not appreciate having “anonymous” data sent from your machine to Canonical.

2 thoughts on “How to help stop Ubuntu spying on you.”

  1. Thank you for your great work!!!

    1. Ubuntu Popularity-contest – sends software information to Canonical.
    2. Ubuntu-report – sends hardware information to Canonical.
    3. Ubuntu Whoopsie – sends crash reports – connects to canonical servers at boot.
    4. Ubuntu motd-news service – sends informations, receives motd news/ads.
    5. Ubuntu geoclue/geoip service. – connects to canonical servers at boot.
    6. Ubuntu kerneloops – a program that collects kernel crash information
    and then submits the extracted signature to the kerneloops.org website.
    for statistical analysis and presentation to the Linux kernel developers.

    Best regards!

    Reply

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