Respostas:
Ele envia informações sobre pacotes instalados (mas isso está desativado por padrão, você pode ativá-lo sudo dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest
) para estatísticas de popularidade / uso de pacotes.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuPopularityContest
Descrição do pacote:
The popularity-contest package sets up a cron job that will periodically
anonymously submit to the Ubuntu developers statistics about the most used
Ubuntu packages on this system.
This information helps us making decisions such as which packages should go on
the first CD. It also lets us improve future versions of Ubuntu so that the
most popular packages are the ones which are installed automatically for new
users.