[drucken]

Note this Reddit comment by what appears to be a couple of MS devs:

(fourbadcats) Indeed. This sure better be an oversight of something not disabled when transitioning from release candidate to RTM. We will lose credibility with our customers if we claim that our application does not collect any usage data when this is going out over the wire. I noticed that notelemetry.obj is not present with VS 2015 Update 1 so this may have been introduced with Update 2. Let's hope it's gone in Update 3.

and this too:

(spongo2) Let me gather some details

However, this is definitely highly disconcerting.

[StephanTLavavej]

The first comment, from fourbadcats, is apparently from a customer of MS (I don't know who they are), referring to their customers in turn. The second from spongo2 is VC's dev manager, my double boss. (I know very little about this topic as the STL's senior developer; this stuff is in the vcruntime layer below the STL.)

[frik]

Yes ask your boss.

> We will lose credibility with our customers if we claim that our application does not collect any usage data when this is going out over the wire.

Microsoft wasted Win10 and Office 2016 already (and sneaked it into newer Win7&8 updates). It would have been such a great chance after the misguided/failed Win8, but then MS decided to add invasive telemetry and other phone home crap incl whitelisting IPs and URLs in kernel mode network layer, with no way to deactivate all of it - don't even think MS respects you as a end consumer (you are their sheep and loose control of your PC) and not even as enterprise customer nor with LTSB (except you request a custom build of the network stack).