Popularity Contest in Ubuntu I am running an old version of Ubuntu (14.04 LTS) because my video card is no longer supported by the kernel in newer releases of Ubuntu. I discovered in my cron.daily directory a script called popularity-contest which is "phoning home" every day. Can I remove it safely? This link says it was reporting to the developers of Ubuntu which packages I am using. popularity-contest_1.57ubuntu1_all.deb

Yes, you can disable this feature safely:


sudo apt-get purge popularity-contest


This will delete the cron script and everything else related to the package, apart from its log files.

(Note that your system might not be configured to phone home — the package needs to be installed, and it needs to be set up to phone home. Look for `PARTICIPATE` in `/etc/popularity-contest.conf`; if it’s not `yes`, you’re not participating.)