[HN Gopher] VSCode deprecates Enable Telemetry, auto-enrolls you...
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VSCode deprecates Enable Telemetry, auto-enrolls you in Telemetry
VSCode has deprecated "Enable Telemetry" and now auto-enrolls you
into their new Telemetry option even if you've disabled all the
previous telemetry settings. Screenshot
https://imgur.com/a/nxvH8cW The changes apply to the most recent
version of vscode (version 1.61.0 released Oct 7).
Author : tmpfile
Score : 147 points
Date : 2021-10-09 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
| siproprio wrote:
| Microsoft: dishonest by default(tm)
| azinman2 wrote:
| What is this telemetry? My OS, computer model, IP, and VSCode
| version? Why is this so bad in comparison to any other web
| application or many other apps these days? I know many are up in
| arms about it, but what exactly is the hidden danger here? More
| ads about computer studs sold via a the meager Bing ads market?
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| It doesn't matter. What matters - if these reports are true -
| is how they treat their users with these dark patterns. You
| just don't treat other people like that, it's just basic human
| decency.
| hamburglar wrote:
| And also there's a legitimate slippery slope here. "Come on,
| this data they are sending is not sensitive" may apply today,
| but after you've opted in, now your job is perpetually
| keeping track of what new information they send in the future
| to make sure your assessment is still true. If there is a big
| off switch, the only thing we have to pay attention to is
| whether or not they are honoring that off switch.
| salawat wrote:
| The problem is other people treating other people's hardware as
| their playground.
|
| We've gone too long without a reckoning as software authors in
| this regard. You are not entitled to do whatever you wish with
| someone else's hardware because of a click through. Those that
| continue to do so will be (in my case) blacklisted from running
| on my network.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> My OS, computer model, IP, and VSCode version?_
|
| Right now, maybe. Or maybe more. Are you happy agreeing to it
| without being told? Being auto-enrolled without being told?
| What about if they add more later and don't feel the need to
| tell you as you didn't make the effort to opt out so must be
| happy with the tracking?
|
| _> Why is this so bad in comparison to any other web
| application or many other apps these days?_
|
| Because others do it doesn't make it right. People rail against
| web properties using what is seen as overly invasive
| telemetry/fingerprinting/profiling dark patterns too.
|
| _> but what exactly is the hidden danger here?_
|
| More information stored about you in more places, from whence
| it can leak further or dubious authorities can demand it be
| released, is a common fear in such cases for privacy
| campaigners and campaigners in general within the reach of
| certain governments.
|
| (if people downvoting would like to let me know why, I'd be
| genuinely interested to know your counter point(s), otherwise
| I'm just going to assume that what I have said is true and you
| don't like it)
| neurobashing wrote:
| for some, simply not allowing me to opt-out without using other
| mechanisms (some sort of internal firewall etc) is enough. It's
| my computer, my network, and I get to say precisely how it is
| used; and that includes telemetry.
|
| There are other threats and reasons, that others more versed in
| this can explain, but that is the one I can speak to.
| d_tr wrote:
| > simply not allowing me to opt-out ...
|
| But let's note that this is not the case here. You can still
| opt out. If they are just resetting your old settings
| silently, however, then this is not a nice move and it will
| annoy exactly the people that care.
| edoceo wrote:
| > they are just resetting your old settings silently
|
| That kind of behavior bis frowned upon in this
| establishment
| [deleted]
| sto_hristo wrote:
| >It's my computer, my network, and I get to say precisely how
| it is used
|
| That is only realistic on linux. Everything else us just
| something you've rented.
|
| Besides, you can always go for independent vscode clone. I
| don't know how good it is as i haven't tried it myself. I
| just know it exists.
| trutannus wrote:
| A lot of the people who care this much also use Linux, so
| this is somewhat of a moot point.
| kodah wrote:
| Linux may be the only kernel (and general class of
| operating systems) that is capable of robust transparency
| and control, but that doesn't mean that it isn't a common
| ideal among more general computer users. The argument I
| hear most frequently is that users are fairly oblivious to
| one or more of these points:
|
| - That data is collected
|
| - That you or your device can be identified from data
|
| - That data does not have an expiration
|
| - How the data is used (eg: multi-use, for troubleshooting,
| for marketing)
|
| There are multiple ways to democratize knowledge, but most
| ideal is having companies just be upfront and teaching
| engineers why it's important to stress building
| notifications and/or levers for these kinds of
| capabilities.
| omreaderhn wrote:
| Check out https://vscodium.com
|
| https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium
|
| Builds of VS Code with telemetry stripped out
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Looks identical, runs the same plugins just without the
| telemetry. The perfect solution.
| easton wrote:
| Except for the remote extensions, Pylance, and Live Share,
| IIRC. Which are pretty important to a lot of people's use of
| VSCode.
| 0des wrote:
| While it can run the same extensions, some have to be
| requested to be added to the code-oss repository, as there
| are some things that I noticed aren't there, and the path
| recommended to those in this situation is to ask for them to
| be added on an as-desired basis.
| generalizations wrote:
| The one extension I use the most is the remote access via
| ssh, and that's not available on vscodium last time I
| checked. Only reason I'm still on VSCode.
| edoceo wrote:
| sshfs? Then the solve is outside the editor.
| brundolf wrote:
| As someone who's worked on multiple power-user GUIs
| professionally, telemetry can be genuinely useful for improving
| the product. You can discover features that are never used and
| should be removed so attention can be focused elsewhere, and
| others that are used frequently and deserve more attention, and
| others that users may frequently have trouble with and should be
| fixed or improved.
|
| I'm not saying this justifies dark patterns, and I have no
| firsthand knowledge of whether Microsoft is exclusively using
| this data for legitimate purposes. If it were me I'd enable it by
| default but make it clear and easy to disable for those who care.
| That said: I don't think the knee-jerk assumption that this is a
| wholly evil thing is justified.
| chadlavi wrote:
| It can be, but when you're a company like Microsoft you've
| poisoned the well with anyone who cares about these things. I
| have no confidence whatsoever that MS has purely good, product-
| improving/research-based intentions with VSCode telemetry.
|
| As for this change, I've seen it myself, and I think it's just
| poor design, nothing evil. They are just refactoring telemetry
| control and fucked up with porting over existing preferences
| because it's not a 1:1 thing.
| ineptech wrote:
| It's not knee-jerk. This is the same company putting ads in the
| start menu and trying to force Windows users to log in to
| microsoft.com on boot. And I guarantee you, the PMs who pushed
| for those 'features' genuinely believed they were improving my
| user experience too.
| tmpfile wrote:
| > make it clear and easy to disable for those who care
|
| Exactly. Telemetry can be a useful like you said and should be
| clear to users when they are being opted into it. Especially if
| someone has disabled all telemetry, they should be prompted to
| enable it or configure it with the new settings. If you
| silently re-enable it on their device when they already went
| thru the trouble of disabling it (and not expecting the
| settings to change day-to-day), you'll get some knee-jerk
| assumptions and reactions, whether your intentions where noble
| or not.
| brundolf wrote:
| Sure, they should have had a pop-up telling people about the
| change and making clear the option to opt-out. That would
| have been better. But seeing some of the responses here you'd
| think Microsoft had started streaming a video feed of your
| entire desktop with no way to disable it.
| tmpfile wrote:
| Definitely. Settings that have the perception of "streaming
| a video feed of your entire desktop" should be treated with
| more care.
| capdeck wrote:
| > make it clear and easy to disable for those who care
|
| No. Make it clear and easy to ENable for those who care.
| chadlavi wrote:
| Microsoft microsofting. By which I mean making confusing UX
| choices that no user would want, with bad presets, and that get
| misinterpreted in the comment-o-sphere as dark patterns
| infringing on our freedoms.
|
| They're transforming the control of telemetry to a different
| option. The problem is that the new option doesn't default to
| being based on your old telemetry opt-out value, it just defaults
| to "on" as if you just downloaded VSC. And this leads people to
| reading all kinds of evil intent into it.
|
| But it's probably not. We've all worked on big complicated
| products at big, slow companies, right? This is just bad design.
| rvz wrote:
| So from bad to worse if true. Do you have evidence or a link to
| this?
| [deleted]
| tmpfile wrote:
| Screenshot https://imgur.com/a/nxvH8cW
| agilob wrote:
| Yea, it's real, you have screenshot in description and PRs
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pulls?q=is%3Apr+telemetr...
| jeff42069 wrote:
| Microsoft thank you. You brought us the LSP and as thus every
| editor has the same capabilities as your spyware anti pattern. No
| need to use Vscode anyway.
| pluc wrote:
| https://vscodium.com/
| jarcane wrote:
| unfortunately, as I discovered with a recent fresh Manjaro
| install, VSCodium cannot access the standard MS extension repo,
| which makes it next to worthless as a production tool because
| no one is uploading anything to their own repo. I can't work
| without my tools, and I can't be arsed to manually install and
| build and update every extension and its dependencies that I
| rely on.
| kova12 wrote:
| if you don't trust microsoft with telemetry, you shouldn't
| trust extensions written by random people either
| nexuist wrote:
| A perfect encapsulation of why these privacy complaints are
| next to worthless. You don't trust Microsoft with telemetry
| but your package.json pulls in 30 packages from completely
| random Internet strangers who published something that
| looked cool on GitHub.
|
| There's no coherent threat model here. There are a million
| different ways to shoot yourself in the foot and compromise
| your codebase before we even begin to consider what
| Microsoft can do with the knowledge of what buttons you
| press sometimes.
| [deleted]
| username91 wrote:
| Reminder that Sublime Text is constantly being improved and might
| be worth a look if you haven't tried it in a while ~
| https://www.sublimetext.com/
| kstrauser wrote:
| On Mac, Panic's Nova is starting to look pretty good. A native
| editor with a profit model of "you use it, you pay for it" is
| more attractive by the day.
| 0des wrote:
| A big reason why I don't buy sublime despite buying other
| products I don't use much is that it is not open source. That
| is a big one for me because even if I wanted to inspect for
| telemetry or other things, I'm not trusted to do so.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Purchase it if that bugs you. Not everything is freeware.
| hu3 wrote:
| How is purchasing going to make it open-source?
| oliwarner wrote:
| Unless the "it" there is Sublime HQ Pty Ltd. That'd get
| you the source.
| [deleted]
| smoldesu wrote:
| Or Atom, which is free/open source: https://atom.io
| andrew_ wrote:
| I still use Atom as my daily driver. There are bugs, yes.
| Some are more annoying than others (looking at you,
| TypeScript plugin). But I enjoy the app's experience more
| than VSCode. I wish I had time to contribute to it, because
| it's still a solid editor, and I hope it lives on a lot
| longer. Also surprised there hasn't been a popular hard fork
| of it yet since the acquisition of GitHub.
| nexuist wrote:
| Serious question: Why does Atom still exist? On the front
| page they advertise something called "Atom Teletype" which
| seems like a ripoff of VS Live Share (or was it the other way
| around?)
|
| Why aren't the Atom people working on VSC instead?
| edoceo wrote:
| I wish. Has bugs that make it unusable. (ie: read whole
| project depth tree on window open)
| gizdan wrote:
| I thought Atom development was stopped? Guess I was mistaken.
| blibble wrote:
| but ultimately owned by the same company as VSCode
| TruthWillHurt wrote:
| End of the day you're getting in bed with Microsoft. No matter ho
| open-source/friendly it seems.
| coliveira wrote:
| This is MS, of course they'll do this kind of thing.
| FastEatSlow wrote:
| Source: https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_61#_telemetry-
| setti...
|
| You are not enrolled into the auto telemetry yet, the deprecated
| options are still respected for now. The new telemtry has the
| levels of on, crash and off. Useful if I want not to contribute
| my device info, but still help them with issues with the software
| itself.
| anonymousab wrote:
| > for now
|
| Looks like it should be "forever" according to this comment:
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/134660#issuecomme...
|
| But telemetry is one of those things that you can never trust a
| company about once it's in. Especially a company with a history
| of both mandatory telemetry and "oops didn't mean to ;)"
| telemetry-related setting resets.
| seabass wrote:
| Microsoft has really been pushing the telemetry lately. Edge
| phones home far more than any other browser. Windows itself has
| no way to fully disable data collection (only the option to send
| "basic" or "full" data, including which websites you visit--oof).
| If you use Pro and you are enough of a power user to feel
| comfortable editing registry settings, that's what is now
| required to turn telemetry off, and even then it's hard to know
| you did it correctly. And this type of tracking is pervasive
| across the entire Microsoft ecosystem, including within Xbox,
| Minecraft, Teams, and now VSCode. It's disappointing to say the
| least.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Can this be removed, given that it has been proven false? Do you
| guys do that?
| tyrfing wrote:
| Still respects the old settings. Easy to confirm by checking
| network traffic.
| fartcannon wrote:
| The goal of stuff like this is to wear you down into accepting
| all default parameters. Then, slowly ratchet up the invasiveness.
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(page generated 2021-10-09 23:01 UTC)