One implication of this that some people don't realize is that a brand new Ubuntu instance -- whether a physical host, a virtual machine, an EC2 instance, whatever -- immediately calls home to Canonical as soon as it spins up for the first time.
The functionality is included in the "base-files" package, which has a priority of "required" and is marked as an "essential" package. Thus, if you have an Ubuntu instance, it's nearly 100% guaranteed this is installed and enabled by default.
(If memory serves, this was added in 17.04 or thereabouts.)
This is what drove me to use Debian. I used to spend quite a but of time hunting down telemetry and other canonical-serving crap, but I eventually got tired of it.
With this crap and others (e.g. aggressive snapping), Canonical is eroding trust in its most important market. Inertia will only take them so far.
Unfortunately I did find such a piece of software.
Is there a way to get the direct download link to a snap? Perhaps a manual way of downloading and installing a snap, that would suffice. I ran into issues (version incompatibility which in itself is not a problem, snap made it a problem) and they made me give up on installing a product that was available ONLY as a snap. They (some company) used to release their crapware as .deb and .rpm before which was extremely easy to extract and use myself (I would just download the .deb file, then do: ar x crapware.deb && tar xvf data.tar.xz), but now it is snap-only. I could not find any direct links on Snapcraft. I do not like this direction, to be honest.
This really shouldn't be required. If you are going to build-in anti-features, at least make sure that there aren't equivalent alternatives to your product. Ubuntu lost me when they started bundling all of the Amazon crap.
I don't think this is "calling home". Ubuntu has been pretty open with their "analytics", which are are really minimal (OS version + screen size + disk size + ...). And yes, they ask for consent.
I think this motd is there to (1) advertise more complex canonical products and (2) be used for security announcements.
Also, I don't think you ever see motd on a desktop install.
I used to have a privacy.sh script for fresh Ubuntu installs back on the Amazon shenanigans days. That file has been empty for a while but I guess I need to update it again.
The functionality is included in the "base-files" package, which has a priority of "required" and is marked as an "essential" package. Thus, if you have an Ubuntu instance, it's nearly 100% guaranteed this is installed and enabled by default.
(If memory serves, this was added in 17.04 or thereabouts.)