It's honestly weird to see "Telemetry" labeled as "Spyware" by a technical people that, quite frankly, should know better.
Spyware is NOT the same as gathering Telemetry data.
You can also just turn off Telemetry in VSCode in the settings.
I think a vast majority of people on HN gather data on customer usage of the products that they build. Because it ultimately makes us able to tailor the products better for our customers. It's just ignorant to put this in the same category as applications that slurp up as much data as they can for e.g. ad-profiles or to sell that data off to the highest bidder.
> It's honestly weird to see "Telemetry" labeled as "Spyware" by a technical people that, quite frankly, should know better.
It's precisely because it's technical people who know better that you see "telemetry" labeled as "spyware", which it is, and it's how we called it back in the 1990s/2000s.
The only reason people these days call spyware "telemetry", is because it got normalized by large companies, and is now defended by devs who figure it's better to ship spyware to people than to give a damn and talk with users.
I would say the intent very much dictates the what and how of Telemetry as well. There's a huge difference between gathering data on feature usage of VSC vs e.g. slurping up the code from its users.
A lot of software lets you opt-out from Telemetry gathering when you install it. I would not think Spyware would do this.
And I feel like saying it's "only in the way collected data is used" really makes a small thing out of something that is very important.
There's a very big difference in doing something maliciously and doing it to genuinely try to make your software better!
Actually there are of course different levels of bad like in any other area of human endeavor. Many criminals who would happily break your car window to steal your laptop wouldn't kill you to sell your Kidneys.
Lots of spyware that wants to remain on one side of a less dramatic divide simply provides "options" for example in the installer that are opt in and vaguely defined that no sane individual fully understanding his options would opt for.
Such software isn't usually cryptolocking your family pictures instead its frequently grossly violating your privacy and selling your time and attention to third parties who in turn may opt to use this bought and paid for back door into your computer to waste your time or cryptolock your family pictures.
Here's a clue. If you have to make a feature opt out because nobody on earth would opt in given time and expertise sufficient to understand your offer then you are victimizing your user. I cannot think of a case where any data collection being anything other than opt in would be acceptable.
> Telemetry and spyware differ only in the way collected data is used.
No, they first and foremost differ in the kind of data is collected. Spying is not spying if you anonymously collect information about how frequently a feature/future/option is used only.
So is your point that what Microsoft is doing is in fact spyware and not technically "telemetry", since what I linked to is what they are actually doing? In that case, to avoid confusion, we should stop referring to it as telemetry.
I disagree - they are correct because once collected, the data is fed into a blackbox, and a user has no way of knowing if the data collected is - by your definition - spyware or telemetry. The beat way to treat this Schrodinger's telemetry, is to assume it's spyware.
What did you expect? Microsoft labeling their data collection actions as "spyware" themselves? "Spyware" is a term used by people who oppose data collection, they didn't ask for. "Telemetry" is an euphemism by the ones that build this data collection into their apps.
I expect professionals to be able to distinguish between the two instead of being suckered into some sort of hive-mind thinking of "all data gathering bad hurr durr".
I'm absolutely all for privacy and limiting unnecessary gathering of data. But there's nuances to this discussion and labeling everything that has any amount of telemetry as "Spyware" does not do anyone any good.
> some sort of hive-mind thinking of "all data gathering bad hurr durr"
Maybe it's not "hurr durr" and people have a legitimate reason to hold that opinion. To those people, any distinction between spyware and "good" telemetry is merely academic and effectively irrelevant.
The MAC address is very important for developers. It tells them which GUI elements are accesed, what error messages are common and what features of the program are accessed.
For some reason developers think they're magically exempt from judgement of their data harvesting. I don't want you monitoring my activity on my goddamn devices, however much you yammer on about having good intentions. The act itself is hostile, and that's why developers are so goddamn sneaky about it. You're invading privacy and creating metadata records that are trivially deanonymized.
There's an honest, non sneaky way of gathering usage information: pay for rigorous testing and price the cost into the product. Telemetry is lazy, invasive, and user hostile by default. Every bit of information acquired from users should be given with informed consent or not collected at all.
The important part of them having the MAC address is that it IS a unique ID. If it wasn't a unique ID, then it wouldn't matter if they had it, because their purpose in taking it is to identify you. So whether it's hashed or not is completely irrelevant.
The fact that they are taking uniquely identifiable information from you, and the fact that their company is as deep in the Ad game as Google, is more than damning enough.
My issue with telemetry is it increases the chances of data leakage. I don't care if Microsoft gets data on what commands I'm selecting from the menus. What I do care about is that they record any free-form entries. Let's say they want to know everything I type in the command palette so they can figure out if they should add aliases for certain actions. That doesn't sound too bad until you consider the case where you tried to paste in what you were looking for, but forgot that you had something very personal in the clipboard. Once that happens, you just have to hope that the first person to see it is a good enough person to wipe all traces of that info out.
By the same standard, Apple telemetry should also be labelled as "spyware" yet nobody would bat an eyelid at Apple mentioning data of their telemetry reports.
I use VSCodium every day, and recommend it over VSCode to everyone, however, due to microsoft's locked down plugins, particulary the ones related to remote development and debug, there are certain things which can be done with VSCode and not VSCodium.
It's worth bearing in mind for those considering switching.
This one is an alternative to the remote development tooling which doesn't work on VSCodium. It is certainly not a full replacement, but you get to poke around the files on the remote system and run commands over SSH.
Yes, but unfortunately if you want to use something like Okteto[0] it requires the microsoft plugin. There are other third party plugins and tools tightly bound to the Microsoft ones making them unfortunately unusable.
Spyware is NOT the same as gathering Telemetry data.
You can also just turn off Telemetry in VSCode in the settings.
I think a vast majority of people on HN gather data on customer usage of the products that they build. Because it ultimately makes us able to tailor the products better for our customers. It's just ignorant to put this in the same category as applications that slurp up as much data as they can for e.g. ad-profiles or to sell that data off to the highest bidder.