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VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

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Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#21

Post by savanaly »

Bootvis wrote: post #17

I think I'm out of the loop: what exactly is so valuable about this telemetry? I don't believe my coding habits can be used for advertising.

FTA: "Visual Studio Code collects telemetry data, which is used to help understand how to improve the product. For example, this usage data helps to debug issues, such as slow start-up times, and to prioritize new features."

I don't work at Microsoft but I work somewhere similar on a product that collects similar types of telemetry and those words are not empty, they are very, very true. We absolutely add, remove, and change things about the UI based on what our telemetry says people do.

And it's not just about moving things around (which I know HN hates), it's about making the page load faster (which I know HN loves!). We are going through a concerted effort to lower page TTVC at the moment and a big part is going to have to be turning off some features that show by default that take too long to load and guess how we'll be making the call about which features to turn off?

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#22

Post by cassianoleal »

nominusllc wrote: post #13
whywhywhywhy wrote: post #10

I honestly wouldn't mind the telemetry but seen as VSCode on Windows will always inevitably completely freeze the entire OS to the point of requiring a restart if you leave it open for long enough, it doesn't give me much faith anyone is looking at it that closely in terms of using it to fix fundamental issues.

I have never experienced this, on any OS.

From all the anecdotes in this thread, I estimate a 50% chance of it happening.

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#23

Post by Lio »

The TL;DR is Microsoft won't tell you what they collect and ignore settings that limit telemetry.

If you use VSCode or its extensions you can't keep commercial secrets from those working at Microsoft unless you block network traffic from VSCode. This seems to be true even in the open source builds like VSCodium.

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#24

Post by chubot »

ttctciyf wrote: post #2

Found this while looking for a way to fully disable telemetry on vscode. After reading, this seems impossible, short of going down to DNS or network blocks of some kind: the "disable telemetry" setting doesn't; extensions have their own telemetry; MS consider the data sufficiently anonymous to be exempt from GDPR, even the vscodium maintainers say they found it impossible to block vs code's eager telemetrizing. I won…

even the vscodium maintainers say they found it impossible to block vs code's eager telemetrizing

Source for this? Does VSCodium with no extensions send telemetry, or is it the extension issue?

EDIT: Oh the quote from VSCodium is in the article:

Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default.

The funny thing is that I was about to install VSCodium for the first time TODAY, because I want live markdown preview. (I want a doc editor, not necessarily a code editor)

The rationale for VSCodium says it's about telemetry, although strictly speaking it's doesn't promise they removed all the telemetry!

https://vscodium.com/

but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking

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I should also say that on the dev side, crash reports are EXTREMELY useful and really do improve the quality of the software. But you used to have to confirm this data would be sent.

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#26

Post by phantomathkg »

falcolas wrote: post #20

Telemetry is godsend for developers, since it lets them track down actual product usage and issues. Telemetry is a privacy nightmare for users, since it sends data to the developers outside of an average user's control - data which is probably easily associated with an individual and kept for eons (disk space is cheap after all). I think telemetry collection is starting to become a professional ethics issue for devel…

As a developer tool, I think it is absolutely possible for Microsoft and extension developers to write a very deep and detail explanation to the users and explain why do they need to collect what telemetry data.

As a user and engineer, I am more than happy to share the usage and crash data with them, but at the same time, I would appreciate if they can be fair to us the user.

Re: VS Code – What's the deal with the telemetry?

#28

Post by Bootvis »

api wrote: post #19
Bootvis wrote: post #17

I think I'm out of the loop: what exactly is so valuable about this telemetry? I don't believe my coding habits can be used for advertising.

* Profiling what languages you code in * Profiling your work hours * Tracking the physical locations of software professionals * Profiling the nature of the projects you are working on * Perhaps: training GitHub Copilot?

I get these are huge privacy infringements and I don't like that but except for improving Copilot I don't see how they would make money from that.

On the other hand, sites such as StackOverflow and Google (possibly even Bing) can get a good guess of the others as well.

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