[jug]

Telemetry is commonly used for statistics on how a product is used, to learn for example if the user interface is counter intuitive or obnoxious with a much better sample size than their own team.

I also note that we still don’t have a clue in this discussion what the telemetry even includes despite tools and probably even documentation detailing this already existing. But I guess it’s more fun to debate this from a philosophical standpoint than the product in question.

[toyg]

From everything I’ve read, MS (and other telemetry-happy developers like JetBrains) see telemetry as a way to gather statistics about UI interaction patterns and popularity of this or that component, so that they can prioritise development towards the most popular features and problems. It’s a bit like our good old “Popularity Contest” package in Linux, but applied to UI elements and behaviours. It’s the sort of thing that resulted in a massive Paste button on the first Office ribbon, because telemetry said Paste was the most used feature.

Sometimes I wonder if I should turn all telemetry on, so that they’d have a datapoint that actually matches my workflow rather than Joe Schmoe’s. It’s a bit invasive though, and culturally speaking is a horrible model (“I can’t change things unless you let me watch what you do all the time”).

Obviously if you care about privacy you should keep telemetry off, but to be honest, if you don’t trust Microsoft to respect common decency about private code, you just shouldn’t use a tool they built in the first place. I use JetBrains tools and trust them enough to leave telemetry on (“voting” for my preferred features, effectively). If you do any politically-sensitive work, though, you should absolutely stay the hell away - because then it doesn’t matter what they do with it today, but what they could do if they wanted (i.e. under pressure from authorities).

[Silhouette]

Obviously if you care about privacy you should keep telemetry off, but to be honest, if you don’t trust Microsoft to respect common decency about private code, you just shouldn’t use a tool they built in the first place.

Isn't that the point of today's discussion: you can use the privacy-respecting alternative instead?

[toyg]

It's still effectively developed by MS, so it might be doing something funky outside of "regular" telemetry and you wouldn't know unless you fully audit the entirety of the codebase.

[Silhouette]

Sure, but now we're comparing an open source product you can build yourself that might be doing something shady but where we have no evidence of that, against a product derived from the open source version that is openly adding privacy-eroding functionality, and with a corresponding privacy policy that is ambiguous at best about how far it will go.

[Silhouette]

I also note that we still don’t have a clue in this discussion what the telemetry even includes despite tools and probably even documentation detailing this already existing.

Unless there are clear statements and guarantees that nothing will change in future updates without the user's express consent, the statements themselves aren't worth much anyway in this kind of discussion.

Microsoft's privacy policies are notoriously opaque, to the point where you'll have trouble verifying that, for example, they aren't granting themselves the right to upload your source code. This observation almost invariably attracts downvotes, but anyone who thinks I'm exaggerating can easily refute the point by citing the places in Microsoft's documentation that say otherwise and guarantee not to change that in the future.