Michael Hudson-Doyle of Team about the decision to remove the package from the main Ubuntu package (popularity-contest) used to send anonymized telemetry about downloading, installing, updating, and removing packages. Based on the collected data, about the popularity of applications and the architectures used, which were used by developers to make decisions about the inclusion of certain programs in the base distribution. popcon shipped since 2006, but since the release of Ubuntu 18.04, this package and its associated server backend have been in a broken state.
Source: opennet.ru