Whoopsie sends bug reports automatically without consent

[Suk Nokirzu]

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 <email address hidden>.

Best regards.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Do you happen to have the apport-noui package installed?

[Suk Nokirzu (suknokirzu)]

Sorry for the late response.
No, from looking at my dpkg logs going back to late 2019, it doesn't look like I've ever had apport-noui installed. Here are the relevant packages I had installed and which I removed a week ago after finding this bug:

remove apport-gtk:all 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.13
remove apport:all 2.20.11-0ubuntu27.13
remove apport-symptoms:all 0.23
remove ubuntu-standard:amd64 1.450.2
remove popularity-contest:all 1.69ubuntu1
remove ubuntu-report:amd64 1.6.1
remove whoopsie:amd64 0.2.69ubuntu0.1

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I suspect what happened is the bug documented in bug 1906877, if the control panel is set to automatic and then back to never the file which enables automatic reporting is not removed. We are working to resolve this bug in all affected releases of Ubuntu. Thanks for reporting this issue and getting us to look into it.

[Suk Nokirzu (suknokirzu)]

It is indeed conceivable that I did at some point in the past fiddle with the reporting UI. That would explain it.

Thanks for taking this seriously. Much appreciated!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for whoopsie (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]