171–180 of 265 posts
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Are the telemetry data made public? If it's not, then it could be manipulated to justify arbitrary decisions from MS
Why would they make arbitrary decisions that run contrary to what the telemetry data shows? That just doesn't make sense.
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They are actually very transparent about the telemetry they collect, and they offer granular control. There is a log of all events sent to MS, and a page in settings dedicated to the different types of telemetry they can be enabled.
Where is the log stored? All I can find online are some instructions that seem out of date as they don't refer to the interface I see (or I don't understand them): "You can inspect telemetry events in the Output panel by setting the log level to Trace using Developer: Set Log Level from the Command Palette." [1] The "page" in settings consists of just two options, and the complete descriptions of the types of informa…
There is an application in the Microsoft store you can install that lets you view all telemetry collected by Microsoft, and the actual data is encrypted. The metadata (which tells you WHAT is being collected) is not. Knowing the people I have worked with in the past, this is to securely prevent modification by users before the data is actually sent. I've worked with lots of people who would modify that data to attempt to get a feature added that they wanted or just to screw with MS.
That tool also gives you the option to delete all telemetry sent from that machine in Microsoft's possession.
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They are actually very transparent about the telemetry they collect, and they offer granular control. There is a log of all events sent to MS, and a page in settings dedicated to the different types of telemetry they can be enabled.
Where is the log stored? All I can find online are some instructions that seem out of date as they don't refer to the interface I see (or I don't understand them): "You can inspect telemetry events in the Output panel by setting the log level to Trace using Developer: Set Log Level from the Command Palette." [1] The "page" in settings consists of just two options, and the complete descriptions of the types of informa…
Setting that to "Trace" will show the telemetry being sent in the Output pane of the interface, amongst a bunch of other stuff, I am sure.
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Tracking should always be opt-in, not opt-out. I base this on expected user preference and trying to optimize for user happiness and functionality. I don’t think this is as true for non-OSS software where the purpose is likely more toward revenue generation than community and user functionality.
First, please let's draw a distinction between different kinds of tracking. We're smart enough to appreciate the naunces here. Some information is more valuable than others. * How many times you clicked Edit -> Paste vs Ctrl/Cmd + V. This is not personal information. It cannot be used in any way to identify you. * Your location/medical information. Guard this with your life if you must. Share it with literally no one…
Search engines are recording really detailed information as you type, as you browse other websites using their invasive trojan-like analytics. With this data you can probably identify anonymous users from their behaviour (even if the ipv4 address is "encrypted" hah). All it takes is for data from one company to end up at another company and I believe this happens very often.
I think the problem is that you need less and less information to personally identify someone as you have more data. We are not intelligent enough to know what data is identifying or not so therefore the only option we have is to stop giving out our data.
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You can view a real time log of all telemetry events in-editor. Or do you mean you’d like them to share with you all he telemetry from all their users?
Well, why not? A bunch of people here are more than happy to defend Microsofts tracking. If telemetry really isn't a big deal, make all that data public. It's our data anyway, collected from how we use their software.
I suspect the tracking in VSCode is mainly used to improve the product. It's probably in my best interest, and the interest of the community as a whole to leave tracking on. I mean, I get it, HN is usually a more skeptical and security-focused crowd. At the same time, it's likely MS will just take that information and tailor their bugfixes and features to the things I need most, so by all means I want them to have it…
One of the more flabbergasting comments I've seen is when Mozilla removed ALSA support from Firefox because nobody stepped up to maintain it, and the metrics showed that it wasn't widely used. There were people complaining about it being removed, and stating that the people who did use it were more likely to have turned off tracking, and thus did not show up. I mean, sure, it might be the case that there were indeed…
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Isn't it? When I opened VS Code on a new computer for the first time today, a message popped up with step by step instructions to opt out
Tracking should always be opt-in, not opt-out. I base this on expected user preference and trying to optimize for user happiness and functionality. I don’t think this is as true for non-OSS software where the purpose is likely more toward revenue generation than community and user functionality.
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They're probably using Windows.
It’s easy to forget just how many things require an installer-wizard-type process on Windows after being on macOS and Linux for a few years.
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> However, the VSCode binary is not FLOSS so you cannot be sure what it is running. That's equally true of the VSCodium binary. It's not a reproducible build, I have no way of knowing from which source code the binary was generated. Of course I could build from source, but VSCodium is just VSCode built from source with a build flag set. So in this regard it's not contributing anything notable (and doesn't claim so ei…
Why is it not possible to build VSCodium in a reproducible way? Does it download packages while building?
* https://reproducible-builds.org
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducible_builds
Sorry, but I don't think I am qualified to explain clearly
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It clearly states in the article that though VSC is open source and you can build it from source, there are opaque components that are part of the VSC installer. The article claims that the installer installs telemetry systems, though they can be opted out of. However, the project owners do not trust Microsoft to honor the 'opt-out' part if not now then in the future. So they have created a fork of the project.
Why in the hell would anyone trust them?