Disable popularity-contest

Howto disable participation in Ubuntu's popularity contest (statistics about the most used packages on this system)

Although we aren't your mother and we will not tell you exactly what to do, we offer this simple advice: Do not remove the package popularity-contest because the package ubuntu-standard depends on this package. While it will not break your system if you do decide to remove popularity-contest, future upgrades may be impacted. You've been warned.... but do whatever you want.

On to disabling popularity-contest

Step 1

== Change mode for the executables 'popcon-largest-unused' and 'popularity-contest'

sudo chmod -x /usr/sbin/popcon-largest-unused
sudo chmod -x /usr/sbin/popularity-contest

chmod -x effectively changes the executables to non-executables (they can never run, even as root)

Step 2

== Delete popularity-contest configuration file

sudo rm /etc/popularity-contest.conf

Step 3

== Delete popularity-contest cron task

sudo rm /etc/cron.daily/popularity-contest