31–40 of 199 posts
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…
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.
These solutions have privacy nuance they are not black and white/evil v good
Worth noting that extensions may separately send telemetry, that do not have to adhere to the main VSCode telemetry configuration settings.
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.
There certainly is a valid argument for Internet access, for example for documentation lookup, schema validation, database editing, etc.
There would be a strict, and yet fallible, vetting process on the extension marketplace to make sure every extension complies with whatever rules are defined.
The TL;DR is Microsoft won't tell you what they collect and ignore settings that limit telemetry. If you use VSCode or its extensions you can't keep commercial secrets from those working at Microsoft unless you block network traffic from VSCode. This seems to be true even in the open source builds like VSCodium.
Which is ironical given that you should be able to completely strip any telemetry code if the complete source is available ...
The TL;DR is Microsoft won't tell you what they collect and ignore settings that limit telemetry. If you use VSCode or its extensions you can't keep commercial secrets from those working at Microsoft unless you block network traffic from VSCode. This seems to be true even in the open source builds like VSCodium.
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.
I'm too afraid to run it.
There's always vscodium which which doesn't have the tracking, similar to Chromium browser vs Chrome: https://vscodium.com/
As the post mentioned, even the VSCodium team cannot shutdown all telemetry. Seems some do not have switches?