Recording how long someone's had their browser open, how many hours of games they've played or how many photos they've viewed is not a log or a crash dump or in any way related to quality.
How about copying/pasting code, inserting tabs into code, inserting break points into code, how many projects you have, references, when you save, why your code wont compile.
Visual Studio is probably the primary reason I'm even bothering with Microsoft but fuck me they collect a lot of unnecessary shit. They claim its "anonymous"... Some of this doesn't seem so anonymous to me:
> ...how many hours of games they've played or how many photos they've viewed...
That part jumped out at me too. This probably means they're recording the name (or even hash?) of every executable you run and comparing to a list of known game .exe files. In addition they're recoding how long you have been using each executable (if not start/stop timestamps).
I'm not a security expert but it seems like this kind of information could be correlated with (for example) Tor exit node traffic to unmask a Tor user or other fun surveillance uses.
Hashing .exe names is way too much work. Since Vista Microsoft has provided an opt-in way for a game installer to optionally flag "Hey, I'm a game". This was used for the mostly useless "Games Explorer", but also little bits of other functionality.
Also, the Microsoft Store has an entire category called "Game" and can just use that.
Worst case though, by "game" it might just use the Window's Xbox app's determinant for shortcuts like Win+G which is essentially, from what I gather, "Does it use DirectX? y/n".
Visual Studio is probably the primary reason I'm even bothering with Microsoft but fuck me they collect a lot of unnecessary shit. They claim its "anonymous"... Some of this doesn't seem so anonymous to me:
"Context.Default.VS.Core.User.Location.GeoId":x, "Context.Default.VS.Core.BuildNumber":x, "Context.Solution.LastSolutionBuildID":x, "Context.DebugSession.VS.Diagnostics.Debugger.DebugSession.StartupProject.UniqueGuid":"{x}", "Context.DebugSession.VS.Diagnostics.Debugger.DebugSession.UniqueGuid":"{x}", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.IsInternal":"False", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.IsOptedIn":"True", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.IsMicrosoftInternal":"False", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.Type":"External", "Context.Default.VS.Core.User.Id":"x", "Context.Default.VS.Core.Machine.Id":"x", "Context.Solution.ActiveProjectGuid":"{x}", "Context.Solution.SolutionSessionID":"{x}", "Context.Solution.SolutionID":"{x}"
Short of actual source they send everything (and details) you do in VS in real time.