The Unwanted Telemetry
Ubuntu is designed with a built-in error reporting system known as “Apport” and an associated daemon called “Whoopsie.” Whenever an application crashes, encounters a segmentation fault, or fails to launch properly, Apport automatically generates a detailed crash dump. By default, the system might then prompt you with a pop-up window asking to send this report to Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) to help developers fix the bug. While this is helpful for the open-source community, if you are running a server, writing unstable custom code that crashes constantly, or simply value your privacy and network bandwidth, the automatic generation of these massive crash reports and the resulting pop-ups can be incredibly intrusive and consume valuable disk space in `/var/crash/`.
Disabling the Whoopsie Daemon
To maintain a clean system environment and stop Ubuntu from automatically generating bug reports and telemetry data when applications crash, you must disable both Apport and Whoopsie.
Open a terminal window by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T. First, disable the Apport service. Type sudo nano /etc/default/apport and press Enter (provide your password). Change the line enabled=1 to enabled=0. Save (Ctrl+O, Enter) and exit (Ctrl+X). Next, stop the Apport service immediately by running sudo systemctl stop apport.service and then sudo systemctl disable apport.service. Finally, you should disable the Whoopsie daemon (the component that actually sends the reports). Run sudo systemctl stop whoopsie.service followed by sudo systemctl disable whoopsie.service. If you want to be absolutely certain no reports are ever generated or sent, you can completely remove the packages by running sudo apt purge apport whoopsie, though disabling them via systemctl is generally safer and easily reversible.