[CrendKing]

That's wrong. They key element of "spyware" is that it monitors and reports outside of it's own realm, and cause damage with the data. Like a keylogger logs keys even it's not the active program. What VSCode does is only monitoring user action within VSCode for technicality. Until you can provide evidence otherwise, calling it "spyware" is act of defamation.

Also, if software with telemetry is spyware, there is no mainstream browser clean. Feel free to use forks like Tor Browser or VSCodium if you like, but expanding the scope of spyware unreasonably only gonna cause confusion to average people.

[jrm4]

It's not "expanding the scope," it's clarifying (or developing) a definition.

And if it causes confusion -- good. There should be more public confusion on this topic, especially in the realm of "Why does this free program need to know all of this stuff about what I'm doing?"

It's not that answer is "no gathering information ever," it's "providers of a program ought to be compelled to fully and clearly disclose to all what information it is grabbing and what it is doing with it."

And that's emphatically not where we live today.