[Bug 1906078] Re: Whoopsie sends bug reports automatically without consent

[Brian Murray]

** Tags added: rls-hh-incoming

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1906078

Title:
  Whoopsie sends bug reports automatically without consent

Status in whoopsie package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  Hello,

  So, I just realized about an hour ago that whoopsie has been sending
  bug reports without my consent since May (2020-05-11 to be exact) from
  checking journalctl where I can see lines like these:

  Uploading /var/crash/[...]
  Sent; server replied with: No error
  Response code: 200
  Reported OOPS ID [...]

  I checked the "Diagnostics" GUI in the gnome-control-center and it
  does have "Send error reports to Canonical" set to "Never"... I tried
  switching it to "Manual" and back to "Never" and that did have an
  effect in /etc/, namelely when going from "Never" to "Manual":

    renamed:    rc2.d/K01whoopsie -> rc2.d/S01whoopsie
    renamed:    rc3.d/K01whoopsie -> rc3.d/S01whoopsie
    renamed:    rc4.d/K01whoopsie -> rc4.d/S01whoopsie
    renamed:    rc5.d/K01whoopsie -> rc5.d/S01whoopsie
    new file:   systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/whoopsie.service

  and the opposite effect is achieved when switching back to "Never". So
  far so good, I guess...

  My /etc/ does have a "whoopsie" file (/etc/whoopsie) which doesn't
  seem to be present in clean installations of Ubuntu and which has the
  following contents:

  [General]
  report_metrics=true

  Switching from "true" to "false" does seem to disable whoopsie, so
  that's nice I guess... but what is this file doing here in the first
  place? To clarify, this was originally an Ubuntu 18.04 system which I
  recently upgraded to 20.04 but the unsolicited error report uploads
  have been going on since well before the upgrade so that's not the
  issue.

  I don't remember touching anything on my system relating to apport or
  whoopsie and my shell history doesn't contain anything about whoopsie
  or apport so this situation seems to have occurred on its own (perhaps
  after an update?).

  This is a pretty serious breach of privacy (and of the GDPR) and
  others might also be unknowingly affected like I was, so the team in
  charge of this might want to push an update that for instance resets
  the /etc/whoopsie file if present (if that truly is the problem).

  While I'm at it I would like all the error reports sent from my
  computer to be deleted. Where can I ask for that? I haven't seen an
  option for that anywhere, apart from contacting
  dataprotection at canonical.com.

  Best regards.

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