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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?

#91

Post by csmattryder »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #71

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 (t…

Ha, vindication. I posted a while back about I used to use OpenSnitch to block VS Code's telemetry requests.

One of the comments mentioned that there's already a setting to disable it, ain't that enough..?!

I'm once again recommending OpenSnitch: because Microsoft won't take "No" for an answer.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30865152

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

#92

Post by gabrielgio »

welder wrote: post #62
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.

That's kinda the point! For ex, my wakatime extension sends metrics about vscode usage so the developer can see their code stats.

That is fine from my point of view. You, vscode and the extension have an agreement of how the data is handled, where is sent to and how it is processed. It becomes a problem when the vscode or an extension ignores the no telemetry settings, keeps sending data, and we have no much of a clue how it is going to be store/processed/used for.

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

#93

Post by gonzo41 »

krono wrote: post #83
gonzo41 wrote: post #40

It's a fair price for a free product.

How can you possibly tell without knowing what exact data is being collected, how it is being used, for how long it will be kept, and where it will end up?

I work around and with a climate scientists. What I worry about has changed.

Metrics and crash statistics are fine. And if they are collecting some dystopian level of data, then I bet that google and facebook has them beat already.

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

#94

Post by nindalf »

techsin101 wrote: post #88
nindalf wrote: post #67

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…

> There is no way to turn this off. What if you added domains to host list

What if you took a hammer to your WiFi router.

Yes, it’s always possible to turn it off but what I meant to say was that the VSCode team makes it hard.

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

#95

Post by [deleted] »

api wrote: post #16
bitwize wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What better text editor?

There are much better IDEs. Check out the Jetbrains products. If you want an editor on Mac there is also Nova: https://nova.app The Rust and web related extensions work pretty well. I've been using that for a while. There are a few more around.

[deleted]

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

#96

Post by any_spite »

alrlroipsp wrote: post #47
nerdjon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love VSCodium. I wish they could find a way around some missing plugins, but it does what I need it to.

Just fix your marketplace settings and use official plugins :) https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium/blob/master/DOCS.md#ext...

Does VScodium support WSL now ? I need windows unfortunately for office apps.

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

#97

Post by tjoff »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #71

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 (t…

Just as showing ads to people willing to pay to not see ads is supposedly the most lucrative thing humans can envision (not sure how royally pissing off your users is profitable but hey, that's me) it seems that tracking people that don't want to be tracked reveals the most precious data imaginable.

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

#98

Post by squarefoot »

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

Telemetry can be an invaluable source of information to improve products, everyone knows that; it's sorta like having 100% of the users continuously reporting bugs and information from which software vendors can infer most wanted features or modifications to improve usability. Which business wouldn't want that? If done right it could be great for everyone, including users. Unfortunately there's no way to ensure that invaluable tool won't one day be used against users to sneak out data that wouldn't contribute in any way to products improvement, namely making profits from users profiling.

But the point isn't being good or evil; businesses have no sense of morals, they don't obey to common sense but rather take the path that leads to the higher profits, and these days profiling users unfortunately brings high profits. It's not a matter of which company is good or bad, or if telemetry can be done right or not, but rather how long until a software with built in telemetry will use it the wrong way, because soon or later everyone of them will be presented the scenario in which doing a bad thing brings them more profits; and this principle applies way beyond telemetry.

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

#99

Post by squarefoot »

belter wrote: post #46
edgyquant wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Enabled by default -> Bad Give user option to enable to improve product -> Good

And possibly keep telemetry data (all of it) auditable by users, so that they know exactly what they are opting in to transmit.

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

#100

Post by ajross »

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, 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.

This seems exactly backwards to me. No one who has ever managed a deployed product with good failure telemetry would say that it tells you "next to nothing". Telemetry detects failures that mere testing simply never can and never will.

And no one who lived through earlier ages of consumer software would ever say that it's "turned to shit". Software is getting better. It's getting better steadily and inexorably, and it's been doing that for half a century. It may not be doing what you want, but it's doing it with higher quality than people in the 90's or 00's would have ever dreamed. When was the last time[1] you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you? This was a daily (or worse) event for most of software history!

And certainly robust telemetry practice is one of the big drivers of this quality revolution we've seen.

[1] Heh, cue the peanut gallery of everyone wanting to post crash reports. That's on me for poor framing, I guess. But seriously, everyone: Both anecdotally and via actual studies, consumer-visible software is getting much better.

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