[uberman]

People don't like being tracked and Facebook has a long history of being deceptive around how and when it tracks people. Facebook also has a long history of selling the data it collects as a result of tracking even when the people being tracked try as they might to opt out.

Hence the "big brother" reference.

Frankly, I was/am a little leary of how Facebook might be "improving" the MSVSC Remote Development pack since I use it every day.

[tudelo]

As an employee working on a corporate device everything will be tracked anyways, this is the most tin-foil take ever.

Your latter concern is at least a reasonable one, but it should all be open source anyways? Not that any of us have the time to audit everything. I doubt Microsoft is going to allow anything nefarious...

[ahartmetz]

> As an employee working on a corporate device everything will be tracked anyways

Note that that isn't true in most (all?) European countries. It is illegal to eavesdrop on employees without a strong and particular reason.

[tudelo]

You're telling me that in the EU things that happen on company assets are not tracked? I think any company could easily come up with a 'strong' reason (IP theft?)

[ahartmetz]

Yes, believe it or not: things that happen on company assets are not tracked.

[uberman]

My employer might track me, but how does that mitigate my concerns that a 3rd party data aggregator like Facebook might track me as well as a result of installing a closed source plugin that they "improved".

[tudelo]

I just addressed this in the second part of my comment. You would have to trust Microsoft/Facebook at this point, right? So if you don't and you really actually care (unlike 99.999999 percent of people), don't use closed source software, and audit every single line of the open source software you use, because I bet a lot less eyes are looking at much of what you use.

[nkohari]

Lots of companies would block their developers from using a plugin if it was determined to contain any sort of non-trivial telemetry.

[fatline]

> People don't like being tracked and Facebook has a long history of being deceptive around how and when it tracks people.

you are mixing unrelated things. As an employee of a company it's unlikely you can raise any concern about your privacy when working on the company's main asset.

> Facebook also has a long history of selling the data it collects as a result of tracking even when the people being tracked try as they might to opt out.

provide a reference please

[IggleSniggle]

Not OP, but I'm also not sure how OP will provide a decent reference of constantly moving goalposts of privacy wrt to privacy implications of the Facebook platform. The default has always been towards public and noisy, even as Facebook has been forced to mature and realize there were privacy implications about things they were doing by default on the platform.

Despite a culture of "move fast and break things," things have never been broken from new more restrictive default privacy settings. Users who signed up in 2005 would still be an open book by default today.

[uberman]

My point was to elaborate on how some other user might feel that Facebook represent a big brother type actor.

However, you have suggested that there is or should be no privacy when doing development, but I'll remind you that not all devs work in large corporate environments and even when they do, they might reasonably expect to be watched only by their employer. It is frankly not 100% clear that Facebook will never have access to telemetry as a result of "improving" this set of plugins. They certainly did not suggest as much.

In my opinion, there is a dramatic difference between what my employer may or may not do to track me and what a 3rd party social media company may or may not do to track my development practices as a result of using a plugin.

While semantically I may have overstated that Facebook "sells" data, they unquestionably considered doing so between 2012 and 2014 despite promises made to the contrary. They also unquestionably shared data with other large data aggregators. Even if USD did not change hands I think we can be fairly certain that Facebook bartered in user data.

Here is your reference: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-gave-some-companies-pr...

[lugg]

Unrelated? How? It's Facebook. They have shown a repeated assualt and disavowement of social responsibility. I wouldn't expect Exon mobile to do very nice things in non oil contexts. Are you saying you would?

Reference? Where have you been? Cambridge analytica? It's advertising arms? It's all selling user data either directly or indirectly. Don't be so naive.