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Comment by admg | Hacker News Reader

Seems like can opt out easily, and the information given appears reasonable so will quite happily check this box.

It will also enable a program called Popcorn that will track and report the relative frequency of your app usage. That is somewhat personal according to some people at least. And this option toggles Apport to send back crash reports without asking permission each time, which means it could(?) leak sensitive data in memory?

I think you mean popcon? Short for popularity contest[1]. It's been part of Debian forever, not sure when it first showed up but it was part of Woody at least. With Debian you could configure it to use PGP and encrypt the reports you send in. I generally disabled it on work computers but left it on at home. That probably didn't help them as much but I just couldn't see leaving this type of feature on for servers and computers that weren't mine.

[1]https://popcon.debian.org/

Debian's installer requires explicit opt-in consent to install popcon. It's not enabled by default.

Yes, that's true. I do think that that's the better way to do it.

I understand Canonical is trying to make a user oriented system that "Just Works" and collecting this data can certainly help with that but I do think that this should be Opt In, not Out. If nothing else to support the precedent that, in general, Opt In is better for privacy that Opt Out.

I've seen popcon in Debian before, tbh I thought it was already in Ubuntu! Some will be happy with and it and some won't, as long as its optional and presented clearly I don't see an issue. Sending crash reports without asking permission... that should probably be independently set from the rest of this opt-out.

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