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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?

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'll recommend VS Codium instead of VS Code then. It provides fully open source binaries of VS Code without all the telemetry enabled.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32571867

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

#162
post #33

How is PyCharm WSL2 support these days? WSL2 is the biggest reason I switched to VS Code 1 year ago.

Dunno about PyChsrm, but IntelliJ developers solve WSL2 issues in low-priority mode. I posted a few and followed a few others, resolution time is many months long.

JetBrains just in general treats all issue as low priority. There’s issues open for literal years that they refuse to do anything about. They say “we looked at this issue, and it’s not on our roadmap, so no.” Ok, but what is your roadmap? Why can’t it include a fix for a 5 year old bug? Oh, because you’re working on a replacement that’ll take 3 years to finish. It’s extremely frustrating sometimes.

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

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'll recommend VS Codium instead of VS Code then. It provides fully open source binaries of VS Code without all the telemetry enabled.

TFA says that VS Codium removes as much as it can, but it cannot remove all of the telemetry.

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

#164

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

I have come to think that telemetry used to track actual product usage is a bad thing. It encourages shallow thinking about how users really use the product, and often leads to terrible product decisions.

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

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just remove it from the source code?

Given the frequency of updates, maintaining a privacy fork with anything but minor changes would be a Sisyphean task.

ungoogled-chromium and Bromite do it for Chromium, so it should theoretically be possible for VSCode.

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

#166

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…

Or just use VSCodium, the actually open source build, with no added closed source blobs and of course no telemetry. It uses https://open-vsx.org , an open source host for VSX plugins. https://vscodium.com/

The end of the article mentions that VS Codium, while having less telemetry, still calls out to Microsoft services.

They try to remove all telemetry, read more about that here.

...

However, VSCodium can’t shut out all the data collection as it is the same codebase. And since extensions act independently with regard to data collection, you still need to be mindful of what extensions you install.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just use VSCodium, the actually open source build, with no added closed source blobs and of course no telemetry. It uses https://open-vsx.org , an open source host for VSX plugins. https://vscodium.com/

The end of the article mentions that VS Codium, while having less telemetry, still calls out to Microsoft services. They try to remove all telemetry, read more about that here. ... However, VSCodium can’t shut out all the data collection as it is the same codebase. And since extensions act independently with regard to data collection, you still need to be mindful of what extensions you install.

I mean that's the same deal with browser extensions. Good to mention, but hardly a surprise.

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

VSCode supports a wide range of languages and workflows. The workflow of the VSCode developers doesn't necessarily align with the workflows of other VSCode users.

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

#170

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…

To emacs with evil? If so, how did it go?
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