Comment 4 for bug 1614820

I looked at activity-log-manager briefly (it provides Unity's Privacy Settings panel). It calls out via dbus to the whoopsie-preferences service which reads and writes two keys (report_crashes and report_metrics) to the /etc/whoopsie conf file. If report_crashes is set, it creates (the blank) /var/lib/apport/autoreport. apport uses the existence of that file to decide whether to send reports

I looked around but couldn't find anywhere that actually uses the metrics setting.

GNOME's privacy schema also has a org.gnome.desktop.privacy send-software-usage-stats key with the description "Send statistics when applications are removed or installed." I think the key itself may be fine but I think we'd need to tweak the description.

My impression is that whoopsie-preferences is unnecessary.

It's also difficult for me to understand what apport, update-notifier and whoopsie are all doing. I think the checkbox in activity-log-manager only controls the automated background error message reporting and not the popups telling you something crashed and would you like to report a bug which I think users find a lot more annoying. For instance, see https://askubuntu.com/questions/93457/how-do-i-enable-or-disable-apport

Maybe the correct way currently to disable those popups is the gsettings boolean key com.ubuntu.update-notifier show-apport-crashes