Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

roboleary.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 199 posts

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

#121

Post by rcxdude »

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…

If the message is to be believed (and the source code does agree: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/blob/d32b92bd7a49ce8667b...), the old settings still apply, the new one may default to 'all' but the old settings will override it, so they've avoided turning telemetry back on for those who had disabled it (in fact if you didn't update the settings and for some reason had only turned off one of the telemetry options, they have in fact reduced the amount of telemetry they are getting from you).

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

#122

Post by lunarplague »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #118
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?

because Microsoft Shop jobs are well paying, not terribly difficult, and allow people to work on personal projects without burnout.

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

#123

Post by uoaei »

shadowgovt wrote: post #110
pseudalopex wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Informal consent (and lack thereof) is still consent (and lack thereof).

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

#124

Post by majormajor »

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…

Why are we just focused on the "stupid" developer here - the sort who thinks your later "wow the 'close popup' button is so popular" example is a good reason to add more popups?

Do we think the people making calls like that would suddenly have great ideas in the absence of data?

Meanwhile, there are plenty of folks out there who can reason about data in less blindly idiotic ways.

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

#125

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

falcolas wrote: post #73
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 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".

I get what you're saying and I agree but I also think you misinterpreted the parent comment.

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

Given the context of the fire extinguisher, "it" in this case is a useful (possibly critical), not-commonly-needed feature, rather than a collection of data.

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

#126

Post by rightbyte »

Bootvis wrote: post #28
api wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* Profiling what languages you code in * Profiling your work hours * Tracking the physical locations of software professionals * Profiling the nature of the projects you are working on * Perhaps: training GitHub Copilot?

I get these are huge privacy infringements and I don't like that but except for improving Copilot I don't see how they would make money from that. On the other hand, sites such as StackOverflow and Google (possibly even Bing) can get a good guess of the others as well.

MS sale team would probably love to get a grep of all "#include " of a company to see of they can do some sales pitch to eat some vendors lunch.

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

#127

Post by capableweb »

welder wrote: post #103
gabrielgio wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's probably true that many Visual Studio Code extensions are Open Source, but there are plenty that are not.

Here is one from a random person on the internet which has the license "All rights reserved": https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=LiamNevi...

Here is another by Adobe that doesn't have a license linked to it (presumed proprietary): https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=com-adob...

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

#128

Post by OrvalWintermute »

shadowgovt wrote: post #109
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 o…

>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

My 20TB drives say otherwise

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

#130

Post by marginalia_nu »

majormajor wrote: post #124
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…

Why are we just focused on the "stupid" developer here - the sort who thinks your later "wow the 'close popup' button is so popular" example is a good reason to add more popups? Do we think the people making calls like that would suddenly have great ideas in the absence of data? Meanwhile, there are plenty of folks out there who can reason about data in less blindly idiotic ways.

Let's take a different example. Let's say you have a search box.

Option A generates 10 times more searches than option B. This may mean the search box is 10 times more useful than in the B case, or the users require 10 times as many searches to find what they want. Looking at the data, you really can't tell. Even without the data, you can dogfood your application and fairly quickly tell whether the feature is good or bad.

I'm not saying anyone is stupid. Naive, perhaps, but not stupid.

The problem is that interpreting data is difficult. Incredibly difficult. Scientists, who construct experiments and interpret experimental data for a living, with a decade of education behind their back, get this wrong all the time.

Post reply on HN