201–210 of 265 posts
There's already a comment here, and I've also personally experienced just from talking with others offline, that a lot of people don't even know VSCode had telemetry, despite it mentioned several times in the product itself and its documentation. They (and remember, these people are supposedly developers ) either ignored it, or just didn't read the docs. I guess a big WARNING banner might scare users away, but it's s…
> They (and remember, these people are supposedly developers) either ignored it, or just didn't read the docs. Or they forgot and their stance on it changed. I vaguely remembered (or thought I did) having seen it. Just checked my settings and it's disabled. I've gotten way more privacy minded in the last 24 months, so I figured I might have said "yeah, you can collect data" back when I first installed it, but now I'd…
Almost nobody will do this because, if they do, they know people will turn it off. It's the same reason commonly given for making tracking (or "telemetry", as they call it) opt-out and on by default, instead of requiring users to opt-in -- "if we have it off by default and ask users to enable it, pretty much nobody will".
They may very well be correct but, to me, that doesn't make it okay.
Is this needed? You can disable telemetry from the settings: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/supporting/FAQ#_how-to-di...
Telemetry is reset to enabled on every update, don't forget to change every time.
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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.
Very few things, if any, REQUIRE an installer on Windows; it's just common (and annoying) that most software is distributed this way for that platform.
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12G to use VS Code? LOL.
I gave up on vscode when it locked up on a 32gb machine. Seeing that there's analytics code inside clears that right up. I assumed the problems I had with electron based apps were the overhead of running a browser on top of the application. The real problem is that it's running 1990s omniture code. Thankfully they haven't added auto-play video to the search yet...
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Telemetry is all about how it’s presented to the user. It should simply be presented at install/first start and users should be shown the checkbox (it shouldn’t be hidden away in settings) and asked nicely to leave it on in order to improve the product. Checked by default is a hot topic but I think it is OK so long as it’s presented clearly to the user. I mean obviously I wouldn’t like any of the information I handle…
Precisely! Albeit I am a bit surprised our infosec team seemingly haven't cracked down or made a stance just yet on Kite and other telemetry software for developers. That day will come soon I am sure :)
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With machine learning they might only need to know your pasting habits and what function names you use most commonly, maybe a bit of information about how fast your type and this will be enough information to identify you based on your behaviour. 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 probabl…
> With Machine Learning Tell me, who exactly is running ML on this data? They're going to great lengths to anonymize this data. If they wanted identifying information, they'd just upload your unixname , they wouldn't anonymize and then de-anonymize with ML. I don't even know how you conflated the metrics on menu clicks with uploading paste data. That's ridiculous. Did you even notice you made that leap?
I don't know what data they collect now or what they will collect later so I am just speculating. But I am sure the ToS has a section about how they can change the terms however they wish.
Please tell me about the great lengths they go to anonymize this data because I believe it to be very difficult to do, and absolutely not in their interest.
Edit: With pasting habits I meant if you paste with shortcuts or go through the menu, not the actual paste content. Sorry for the confusion.
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Opt-in telemetry likely won't serve it's purpose. Very few users change the defaults. To the point where you don't get enough data for useful insights.
That is exactly right. Almost no one would turn it on if it were off by defauly, which makes data collected by those few users strongly biased against general users and their usage patterns. (Meaning that the data you do collect will be useless.) This is literally the only reason that telemetry is almost always on by default. There is no illuminati secretly buying developers to learn your secrets via application tele…