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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?

#101

Post by krono »

gonzo41 wrote: post #93
krono wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We don't know the true cost of using this application, is what I was trying to say.

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

#102

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

savanaly wrote: post #21
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, an…

I agree but I think this is a niche case where we are talking specifically about a development tool. I assume VSCode developers are dogfooding VSCode. They know what users want because as developers they themselves are VSCode users. Telemetry, other than crash information, seems unnecessary.

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

#103

Post by welder »

gabrielgio wrote: post #92
welder wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

vscode extensions are open source so the community should report and vscode should ban extensions behaving badly. That's the same way all plugin marketplaces work, nothing bad vscode is doing with their extension setup.

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

#104

Post by d_tr »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #63
nominusllc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never experienced this, on any OS.

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

I guess you are not referring to some MS extension but to the editor itself, right?

I had an issue around a year ago with cpptools on Linux, where a single 80k LOC header would cause obscene memory usage (10+ G) and the extension would basically stop working.

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

#105

Post by marginalia_nu »

ajross wrote: post #100
marginalia_nu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> When was the last time 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!

Huh. I've used software since the mid 1990s, and I can't recall using software that crashed daily, let alone frequently. Which is honestly a bit of a miracle, since a lot of software back then was shipped without the ability to patch it at all.

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

#106

Post by mmebane »

The extension author docs [1] say that extensions _should_ obey the global setting, even if using their own telemetry libraries:

> Extension authors who wish not to use Application Insights can utilize their own custom solution to send telemetry. In this case, it is still required that extension authors respect the user's choice by utilizing the isTelemetryEnabled and onDidChangeTelemetryEnabled API.

I suppose the quote in the article is technically correct, because there's no guarantee that _will_ follow this. I'm curious if I could report an extension for abuse and have it removed if it doesn't honor the global setting.

The article also says

> Microsoft’s C# extension (ms-vscode.csharp) sends data to Microsoft. There does not appear to be any setting offered by the extension to turn telemetry off.

I unzipped the extension and looked at the package.json, and it appears to use Microsoft's recommended extension-telemetry library, so I presume it is following the global setting.

I wish Microsoft required extensions to publish detailed telemetry info (or, really, info on any and all external connections an extension might make) on their Marketplace page.

[1]: https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/telemetry

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

#107

Post by pseudalopex »

ajross wrote: post #100
marginalia_nu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> Telemetry detects failures that mere testing simply never can and never will.

Product usage and failure reports are different. It wasn't called telemetry when apps just asked to send failure reports.

> When was the last time you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you?

An hour ago or so.

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

#108

Post by falcolas »

ajross wrote: post #100
marginalia_nu wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

> When was the last time you saw a major consumer application (the TikTok or Instagram client, or your web browser, or VSCode) crash hard and fail on you?

Yesterday. The kindle app. It has a habit of soft locking on a book's cover. TikTok's failure mode tends to be more of a "refuses to play a video" kind. Especially if you're scrolling through videos and one does not exist. It doesn't like that. Instagram soft reboots pretty often (you can tell because you're back to the home feed, as opposed to where you left off), especially after being suspended.

I have to reboot my Mac weekly, both for updates and to keep it from misbehaving oddly.

It's one thing our development culture actually fosters these days - let it fail and restart in a known state; as opposed to doing what you can to keep the software alive through non-fatal errors.

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

#109

Post by shadowgovt »

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 and issues.

Extremely true. Data gleaned from actual usage instrumentation is radically higher quality than self-reported.

> 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

None of that is usually true. In the common case, users don't care (after all, MS has the telemetry to estimate how many users disable telemetry). And product improvement data is pseudonymized and usually worthless after a version iteration.

I think the folks that have an anxiety about product use data collection don't realize how worthless individual data points are. The data is pseudonymized out of necessity if for no other reason; it comes in as such a firehose that it has to be immediately analytically bucketed or it overwhelms storage at the volume these tools get used. However, the telemetry options get defaulted to "on" because volumes of data are invaluable for concrete analysis of how the product is used, counts on feature access frequency, understanding pain points in usage flow, etc.

I've done some work in this space (not for MS) and am happy to answer any questions people might have that aren't "Who did you work for?"

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

#110

Post by shadowgovt »

pseudalopex wrote: post #42
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…

Collecting data without informed consent was an ethics issue always.

Not hardly. In the early days of the Internet it was seen as tit-for-tat among peers; you're accessing my server for data I have, of course I'm allowed to log and analyze your request. That was the exchange.

The exchange was rarely made explicit in any kind of formalized consent sense.

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