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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?

#71

Post by nathanaldensr »

A warning for people who, like me, long ago disabled telemetry in Visual Studio Code: Microsoft introduced a new setting that deprecates the two older settings... and the new setting defaults to "all"[1]. I just noticed this now after double-checking my settings. Sneaky, sneaky, Microsoft (but still totally expected).

[1] https://imgur.com/a/RbrsuyA

You will want these three settings in your default settings JSON (the first two just to be safe):

    {
      "telemetry.enableTelemetry": false,
      "telemetry.enableCrashReporter": false,
      "telemetry.telemetryLevel": "off"
    }

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

#72

Post by zerkten »

phantomathkg wrote: post #26
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.

They publish research updates like https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/experimentati....

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

#73

Post by falcolas »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #68
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…

> Telemetry is godsend for developers, since it lets them track down actual product usage This is is actually a terrible trap, as product usage tells you next to nothing about which features are useful. I suspect it' a big part of why a lot of software has turned to shit last decade or so. Look at it this way: Your average fire extinguisher sits mounted on a wall its entire life and is never actually used. You still…

> This is is actually a terrible trap

Agreed.

> You still rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

And there's the trap. Data is a liability, but until a company gets burned for losing it, they won't do anything about it. Well, being real, even if they do get burned it's just the "cost of doing business".

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

#74

Post by gabrielgio »

kroltan wrote: post #34
gabrielgio wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a gross oversight from their part. Not only they build a product that, as pointed by the post, sends a excessive amount of data, but also allows anyone to do the same. > Why have licenses like these if they are just concerned with product improvement? That nails it for me. I have no reason whatsoever to use vscode.

What's the alternative? Blocking extensions from accessing the Internet? How are you even supposed to do that given extensions already have (completely justified) access to the filesystem and can invoke executables? There certainly is a valid argument for Internet access, for example for documentation lookup, schema validation, database editing, etc. There would be a strict, and yet fallible, vetting process on the e…

You have a point. There is no way to block access to resources given the nature of the product, but they could, at least, make more effort to create a better community/environment around the tooling (regarding data handling).

> extensions may separately send telemetry, that do not have to adhere to the main VSCode telemetry configuration settings.

From what I see things that should never happen and should yield a block from the marketplace.

Like you mention, in the end of the day that is not enforceable, but more transparent data privacy policy would show some good faith from their side.

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

#75

Post by ttctciyf »

onion2k wrote: post #8
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…

I wonder what is the most effective way of actually completely stopping it phoning home, apart from yanking its ethernet cable? Use your operating system's firewall app to block all outbound connections from it.

I was thinking of blocking its endpoints, except I don't know what they are.

I wasn't aware I could configure firewall rules for specific applications. Any hints where I could start looking at that?

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

#77

Post by npteljes »

edgyquant wrote: post #32
throwaway22032 wrote: post #29

It's Microsoft. It's what they do. It's been 20+ years. I'm not even old. I just don't understand how people haven't figured this out yet.

Okay but companies don’t just add telemetry because it’s a fun and exciting engineering challenge. They do so for legitimate engineering and business reasons. These solutions have privacy nuance they are not black and white/evil v good

Factory farming is also an engineering challenge, with legitimate business reasons - its way more economical. I think most of the time horrible things just make sense, in some other framing.

My point is - something being useful is a very low bar. It's not the point of the discussion here. Maybe some privacy zealots won't acknowledge this, but telemetry can be very useful, and at the same time a breach of privacy.

And regarding Microsoft, it's also about their attitude towards it. It's their way or the highway. It has always been like this - the software might be the way it is, but regarding their business dealings they are and always were ruthless. That's what made them great. So now what we see is a continuation of their previous attitude. And a slice of the current zeitgeist which is always-on internet with everyone slurping up user data.

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

#78

Post by falcolas »

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.

IMO: Whether they make money off of it or not doesn't matter. They're collecting and storing gobs of data that they don't need. It's arguably not their data (i.e. the branch and repo from my .git directory), so they shouldn't be collecting or storing it.

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

#79

Post by zerkten »

falcolas wrote: post #60
bentcorner wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think about regulation like the GDPR?

I like them. I don't really understand how it would apply to telemetry - it's not something I've read into - and I don't think many other folks are looking into GDPR compliance with telemetry either.

All of the big companies have armies of lawyers deeply familiar with these laws and regulations. They make their engineering teams implement processes to mitigate the issues with storage and processing.

Examples: replacing/removing external IDs, ensuring data can't be linked to users, aggregating data, not retaining data, only processing data within data centers (no data extracted to laptops), deleting old data, etc.

This is why it's slow and painful to work at big companies compared to startups. It doesn't mean that accidents don't happen, but it's pretty well thought out. The same applies to how they do qualitative research. It's got reasonably high standards which are fairly consistently applied. It's not perfect, but nothing is. There is a lot of job security and motivation for people to make it better.

Smaller companies have almost zero understanding of how to deal with this due to lack of resources and expertise. The only way they get compliant is by using good tools which force the user into a safer, more compliant posture.

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

#80

Post by Lio »

rstat1 wrote: post #36
Lio wrote: post #23

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.

So I guess this page on their website is fiction? https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry

Yes. That is what the article is telling you.
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