So much mindless paranoia here. If you don’t trust Canonical, don’t use the product.
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In case you watched the Star Trek, your statement could be paraphrased as the Borg’s “Resistance is futile”.
This word game where everyone who disagree are mindless and not worthy of the product brings the discussion to the level of the kindergarten.
The world is not in black and white, right or wrong, because there is no such thing as perfection. It’s much more in the grey zone where some people have more concerns about privacy, some care more about making more profits, some don’t even care about privacy and the rest… Well, the rest that don’t even know how to screw in the light bulb.
You see, some people that do care, know how the metadata is being collected and handled by alghoritms that make user profiles out of those metadata and store them in the databases. Have you ever searched for something on the internet and later on some site (let’s say facebook) you get sponsored adds leading to the same type of product you searched for earlier that day.
Some sites like ms, amazon, google, fb… follow you even when you are not using them via cookies and other means. They all say that “it’s for your own good” and they “just want improve their services”. So everything you are interested in the past and present or do online is of their concern. Every site, every link, every add window you close. That way they know about your interests and habbits and sell them to other companies for “research”. This is how you become a product and the product you have bought in the store is not yours because you have no control over what is being collected about you.
Canonical is very influental and is contributing a lot in the the open source and free software. The concern is that Canonical wants to mergde the data collection policy, from the companies like MS and Apple and othres, with the free software fondation principles. Those two can not be merged. And if this passes so easily, will other companies follow?
What the companies have learned is that users don’t react well to their controversial changes, so they make small changes, step by step to get them used to their new policies regarding data collection. Today they collect this and that, tomorow they will add even more data and services to the watch list.
Raising concerns about the default opted-in data collection is a message to Canonical that some boundaries should not be crossed. If Canonical keeps pushing in the direction of this data collection, of course, other distros are something to reconsider.
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You and others here are being deliberately misleading. Canonical wishes to collect a system profile to better understand the end user’s typical configurations and possibly improve the product from that information. They have not announced any intention to collect personal data such as browsing habits or sites visited, and there is no basis to assume such an intent. Canonical offers their product free to use, only charging for support. Other companies with flagship products do not do this. Other companies collect system and usage metrics much more aggressively than a simple installation profile, that you can opt out of, and no one is attacking them. You are creating a scenario that doesn’t exist, accusing someone of an offense that has not been committed…all without evidence, of course.
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So… “mindless” and “misleading” eh?
Okay…
Carry on
Thanks for the YouTube link, am passing it along.
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OK, I was one of those the hollered pretty loud. I finally went to the video (Wimpy posted it in reply 33) and pulled this excerpt that gives us some information:
Plus I listened to about the first 10 minutes and I'm ashamed.
IMHO, they are doing a good thing, by collecting the data claimed above.
Nuff said, from me.
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I believe that these data are good for improving and knowing about the operating system, I do not see that it affects my privacy or my data, I see it well…
In the beginning with U-M (last year) on a regular basis i saw the icon above in the tray(cupertino) at home as well as at the office, with a message saying an Error occured and if i want to send the datas with options for more datas to be send, each and every time it happened i checked all the boxes to send maximum datas.
When i said "on regular basis" i can say at least every week... at least! Although it never affect the stability of the OS, as we can continue to work like if nothing happened, so i didn't care about the splash and just check the box to send datas about what happened => every time!
With weeks passing this icon get more rare and rarer, It's many months now that i didn't see this icon, For this post i needed to search in the system. 
We started with U-M 16.04.2 LTS we are now on U-M 16.04.4 LTS so basically it's the same OS with patches, and i truly believe that i/we (at the office too) participated to a better and less error prone OS by sending our "crash report"!
You all want a better system for all your needs?!
So.. they need datas about your needs, there is no escape about that!
If developpers just guess your needs it will be all wrong!
Just my thoughts.
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How can we, as users, access this data?
I am about to buy another laptop to try 18.04. Since I wasted a few weeks (plus all those helping me) trying to put 16.04 on my OLD Compaq nx6325 dual core AMD I do not desire to fall into that trap again.
I would like to make a somewhat intelligent choice of an older laptop. But that also begs the question of validity of data collected. For example was it recorded that I installed 16.04 on the nx6325 even though it was never successful?
Tried searching the internet, but could not find the data access point.
Thanks, Fred
They are still working on it… :
Dang, I was hoping it was available. I had found that article, but nothing else. Now I know why.
Thanks for elucidating me, Fred 
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I personally think it’s a great idea as perhaps now we can get some accurate Linux user number figures that aren’t off some webcounter that’s manipulated by Microsoft (Netcounter anyone).
Without some form of data tracking that’s opt out, there’s realistically no other accurate method to gain such statistics.
It should be opt-in. This shouldn’t need to be said.
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It also says that popcon and apport will be installed and presumably set to run without user control.