A knowledgeable friend just told me "Ubuntu got caught a few years back including what too many users felt was too much telemetry. No idea how it is now." I guess that's where that got started.
At one point, they sent search data to Amazon to get revenue as an affiliate. That too was trivial to disable but enough people didn't like it so they stopped doing so.
As I recall, it too was a choice during the installation process. That was not their best move, but it did get removed quickly. That was more than a decade ago.
Oh, and crash reports may be shared - if you let them be shared. You can see the data that's included in a crash report. Frankly, that's the kind of information they should collect and pretty much all the major distros collect that data. It's pretty important to know about bugs, especially if there's a trend in the bugs. Once again, it tells the devs where to invest their resources.
Ubuntu is developed and distributed by a corporation, as are a number of other popular distros. They sell an enterprise product and support, but you get all of that for the low cost of nothing and up to 10 years of support for their LTS builds.
They're also the platform many other distros are based on. Their contributions are many and their easy installation process made Linux accessible to many people who weren't so technically inclined. Between that and WUBI, they're done a great deal to make Linux more approachable to the masses. People have forgotten this, or never knew this to begin with. They did so much for Linux that, at their own expense, they used to send you installation media by mail.
Ubuntu and Knoppix seem to be unknown in what I'll call 'modern Linux users'. There's a ton of misinformation out there, almost as if some folks want to taint the pool for their own ends. Then this stuff is parroted by people who can be forgiven because they simply don't know any better.
