How to Track Package Popularity Over Time in Ubuntu

It sends information about installed packages (but this is disabled by default, you can enable it using sudo dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest) for package popularity/usage statistics.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuPopularityContest

http://popcon.ubuntu.com/

Package description:

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.

Given that ubuntu-standard is a metapackage, removing it do not imply the removing of any other package, nor the removing of some functionality:

$ sudo apt-get --simulate purge popularity-contest 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following packages will be REMOVED:
  popularity-contest* ubuntu-standard*
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 13 not upgraded.
Purg ubuntu-standard [1.245]
Purg popularity-contest [1.53ubuntu1]