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

I am one of those who began coding in Notepad and then quickly moved on to Vim and then to Emacs.

When the whole world of internet services began consolidating around the web and then later when the whole web began consolidating around a few powerful walled gardens, I saw how these trends began chipping away at our anonymity, privacy, web performance and software performance. Computers are ubiquitous but privacy is under attack. Hardware is faster but software is slower. Internet pipes are faster but websites are sluggish.

In all this turbulence I thought at least my software development tools are not affected by these terrible user-hostile trends. Emacs has become faster with faster hardware. While Vim was always fast, I am sure the Vim folks too would agree that they can now run Vim with a lot of plugins thanks to faster hardware. These editors do not do hidden telemetry. They don't add user hostile features. The core editor experience remains more or less the same year after year.

Even after all the disruption (I mean literally, disruption, not in some positive metaphorical way) in the rest of tech world, I have found consolation in my modest code editor, Emacs for me, Vim for some, other editors for other people. My code editor has always served my best interests. It helps me write code and documentation without any distractions. But when I read articles like this about VSCode and its telemetry, it really makes me anxious. Perhaps Emacs or Vim will never be afflicted by issues like this. But still ... If developer tools meant for ordinary software developers like me are going to start sneaking on my data and begin bundling user-hostile features, what hope is there for all other kind of software tools!

It's just Windows and how long are your uptimes and do you leave it open all the time?

I know it's not just me because I did find the github issue and there was no fix so I just stopped using VSCode

The only way to really escape telemetry today is a local firewall that can block network access by application.

I would like to see some analysis of the telemetry Jetbrains sends and whether you can turn it off. It's a paid pro IDE so it wouldn't surprise me if you can really disable it because some commercial customers will not want telemetry. In high security environments it's often considered bad due to the possibility of accidentally exposing secret information.

It's safe to assume Microsoft is GDPR compliant. There's no sense in risking the fines GDPR could potentially levy for the sake of ... what exactly? There's no upside even if this data was somehow de-anonymized. The sensible thing to do is to delete everything within 90 days. Even if the developers behind VS Code didn't agree with that, legal and privacy at MS would make sure they would.

All this talk about how this data can be used to target people seems far fetched. Microsoft doesn’t have a serious ads business. What they do have are various products and services to sell to developers - Github and Azure among them. That’s the whole point of VSCode - give it away for free so they can understand developer practices and also upsell paid products. And if anyone doesn’t like that, they can simply … not pay Microsoft any money.

My concern is that anybody at a company can suggest a telemetry point and it's added with little or no oversight, and store it forever. It may not be a fun engineering challenge (though it could be, depending on the metric), but sifting through the results is a "fun data interpretation" event. Especially for marketing and sales groups.

The solutions should have a privacy nuance... but don't. For example from TFA, collecting git branch and repo names. That seems like a terrible idea, since it's not like Microsoft's devs will have access to reproduce issues from those repos. It's also a potential leak of sensitive corporate data.