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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?

#111

Post by Macha »

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…

MacOS, an hour ago.

Before that, Fastmail on Android, this morning.

Slack on iOS gets stuck a few times a week.

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

#112

Post by jsmith45 »

pseudalopex wrote: post #57
rstat1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The article went into detail about it.

Except the article does not. If you turn off telemetry and crash reporting, then there is no telemetry. (Except possibly the telemetry from plugins that choose not to honor the telemetry toggle). This post provides no examples of telemetry being sent when the option is turned off.

Now the program does have a variety of spots where it is designed to contact Microsoft services, like say the extension store, or update checks, or other similar functionality. Those services will (obviously) keep some level of logging data, which you cannnot opt out of if VSCode Talks to those services. This is what the terms are talking about when they indicate that not all collected data can be opted out of.

There is no "Don't talk to any Microsoft cloud service" feature toggle, sure, but would not really be a sane toggle people actually want. For example that toggle would need to forcibly disable the git support to ensure those features don't try to talk to GitHub if you open code in some GitHub checked out repo. It would disable the extensions store. It would prevent the update checking, etc. VSCodium would end up wanting to rip chunks of that toggle's functionality back out, since for example, VSCodium uses a different non-Microsoft extension store by default, so would want want the extension store to remain disabled.

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

#113

Post by shadowgovt »

rkagerer wrote: post #84
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…

This is not a nuanced argument or compex issue. Include an OFF switch. It's that simple. Personally I refuse to work with or consult for companies that don't get this. It's a matter of professional pride. If I wouldn't use it myself, I'm not going to foist it on my users.

One of the challenges is defining what counts as telemetry.

So they include an OFF switch. Does it also switch off checking for new versions of VSCode? Does it turn off consulting online sources for dictionary updates? Does it turn off viewing the extension library? Those requests are technically also telemetry but if you disable them they look like broken features. The license agreement is written with open language to say "There are some things you can't turn off" because MS doesn't know a priori whether a court would consider "updating the extension library" telemetry until someone drags them into court and presses the issue legally, and they want their asses covered either way.

And the OFF switch doesn't switch off any extensions because the API is open enough that extensions can do their own network access independent of VSCode.

In practice, it turns out to be very hard to build one guaranteed-to-work OFF switch. Not that it isn't a laudable goal. But in general: if it has online features, assume telemetry == true.

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

#114

Post by fragmede »

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…

"trap". If feature A has 100% of users using it and feature B has 0%, what should I, as the app developer spend my time working on?

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

#115

Post by marginalia_nu »

fragmede wrote: post #114
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…

"trap". If feature A has 100% of users using it and feature B has 0%, what should I, as the app developer spend my time working on?

If your application keeps opening popups all the time, I will use the close popup button very often. Doesn't mean I enjoy closing your popups or want to have to close them. The only reason I'm using the feature is to get around an annoyance in your hypothetical application.

Frequent use of a feature is just as much a signal that the feature is an obstacle as it is a signal that the feature is beneficial.

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

#117

Post by dogleash »

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[1] you saw a major consumer application [] crash hard and fail on you? This was a daily (or worse) event for most of software history!

The apps I use are now riddled with hang bugs rather than crash bugs. Huzza.

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

#118

Post by throwaway22032 »

ctrlmeta wrote: post #61

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 u…

Right? It's baffling.

I still don't understand why developers use Microsoft tools. At all.

About the only valid use case I can think of is creating Windows native apps and _maybe_ testing on IE/Edge.

Otherwise, why? Just why would you wade in the shit when there's a lovely clean pool right over there?

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

#119

Post by paulclinger »

fragmede wrote: post #114
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…

"trap". If feature A has 100% of users using it and feature B has 0%, what should I, as the app developer spend my time working on?

Restore backups may be a rarely used feature (where applicable), but it's not a good reason not to have it (working properly).

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

#120

Post by sbierwagen »

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…

>crash hard and fail on you?

Google search on Chrome on my home computer has a habit of just returning a white page after about a day of computer uptime. I have to switch to a different profile to get it to show anything.

Magento CMS will silently hang if you try to perform any query on a tab that's logged out. Default login cookie expiration time is one hour.

iOS keyboard has started suggesting german words in autocorrect. A third of the words I get on swipe input are now worthless. German is not in the languages list on that device. I read a suggestion to uncheck "German" in the dictionaries list. It was indeed checked (Why?? Because I frequently type in my German last name?) but unchecking it did nothing.

Discord app on iOS has a hard crash bug on the emote picker if you type a query that has no results, backspace it, then try to pick one of the new results. I actually tried reporting that one and they told me to fuck off. (Which is the default response of every customer service team to any bug report, of course, since 99% of bug reports will be from civilians who have no idea how to report a bug)

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