Just some feedback from the field: I work with some high-security networks, and the perception from those Microsoft customers is that whatever "good" that has come from Microsoft improving security in general has been completely undermined by the pervasive telemetry.
Windows 10 alone has something like 200 individual settings for disabling its various forms of telemetry. Office adds several dozen more. Dotnet itself has telemetry, then PowerShell on top of that. VS Code and Visual Studio both send telemetry.
On and on, and on... and then some more, and on... and ON and ON and...
There's just no end to it.
As administrators, it's like playing whack-a-mole against a thousand moles that are breeding exponentially.
Noted. I can't speak for anything other than VS Code but we have the toggle in product which is all you need to change to turn it off for the core, extensions may have their own setting or share the core toggle, but we often can't control that.
There's also the very detailed page on the website detailing this as well as how to see all telemetry events that are sent in real time in the output panel and even how to print out a report of all events that get sent with their classification (code --telemetry).
If you're interested in collecting feedback and passing it on, the other criticism I have in this area is that Microsoft's privacy policies are incomprehensible. Everything seems to refer to the same huge document in the first instance and that document seems to depend by reference on numerous supporting documents. Even figuring out which supporting documents might be relevant seems to require understanding ambiguous terminology about whether any given application or service fits into various categories.
Personally, I'm not interested in messing around with that kind of nonsense. I don't want to engage a lawyer just to find out if I can safely run some software and in the modern world where we're dealing with things like personal data and sensitive business information (including code and clients' proprietary information used to write it) an organisation with Microsoft's recent track record on privacy isn't going to get the benefit of the doubt.
With all this backlash on telemetry, is it worth it? What are you actually getting from it beside ruining the progress MS has made with the dev community? Trust is hard to earn and takes seconds to lose.
Remove it. Then champion removing it from the rest of MS’s products. If you must spy to learn your market, you should not be in that market.
I still hold onto a Sublime Text license waiting for the day MS shows it’s true purpose of making VS code free. Has this day come?
Please don't flame people like this on HN. Regardless of how strongly you dislike or disagree with $BigCo, we want HN to be a place where people with inside knowledge can speak freely about what they know, without being attacked for it. It would be a bad outcome for HN to disincentivize this. Past explanations of this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=disincent%20by:dang&dateRange=....
Edit: you've been posting a ton of unsubstantive and flamebait comments, most if not all of which are on this same theme, and you've been doing it for a long time. We ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so please don't do it any more. (No, we don't care about $BigCo. We care about keeping discussion here out of the shallow-flamewar end of the pool.)
The reason is that Microsoft as a company is all-in on "data-driven" everything. They're trying to get their customers to adopt this approach too (and mostly succeeding, our company execs are constantly going on about it). Disabling telemetry breaks this so they make it as difficult as possible. Because that's where they're planning to have their major value-add.
I really hate it too. But it seems so be so heavily anchored in their strategy that I don't expect them to lighten up about it.
It's high time OSs try and implement something akin to what DoNotTrack was intended to do in web browsers. Of course it will have the same adoption issues faced by DNT, but if first-party apps (like VSCode, DotNet, and PowerShell under Windows) honored a centralized setting it would make life so much easier.
Well, for Windows there is https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 to help manage telemetry and other settings, though the OS resets certain user choices after updates.
Though, if possible, consider using GNU/Linux whenever possible - distros like Debian have historically had little controversies around them, even package popularity metrics are presented as a choice to you during install time: https://popcon.debian.org/
Certain other distros like Ubuntu have a bit more controversy surrounding them, for example, the snaps package mechanism which takes away the user's control over updates by default, though that's more of a security hole and a stability risk, rather than aggressive telemetry related (unless it's introduced by the package creators, a la Audacity's plans that were later rolled back https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835).
Of course, if you truly care about your privacy and open software, you might as well use a fully GNU distribution, such as Trisquel, though there are factors like hardware compatibility and software availability which could pose challenges in such cases: https://trisquel.info/
Windows comes in many flavours. The most "just stop it, okay?" version is the Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC).
It's like the Windows you used to like, back in the XP days. No Xbox gaming bar or Minecraft. Minimal (no?) telemetry. No forced updates every 6 months that break things randomly.
In my line of work we used it a lot for things like virtual desktop fleets with thousands or even tens of thousands of instances
Why? Because the "normal" builds would every now and then just 'decide' to force update themselves despite our best efforts to stop that. All at once. On an ephemeral environment, where the machines would reset on boot, and then try to apply the forced update again. And again, over and over...
Some Microsoft manager wanted their KPIs met, so they just.. rammed something through. Fuck everyone running a VDI fleet, a billboard, a kiosk, a test environment, or anything that needs any kind of stability at all. Big man at Microsoft needs a bonus for that new Tesla!
This was common practice in our line of business. LTSC or failure, those are the options.
Meanwhile, Microsoft, whenever they turned up to a customer site, would just keep harping on about how LTSC is not intended for users, how it's "bad", and how the six-monthly releases provide Enhanced Experiences(tm) or whatever. They would stop just short of calling us unprofessional in front of our customers. Just.
It was the most absurd thing to watch happen. The disconnect between Microsoft and their customers is almost comical now...
"If I've been called here, I can safely assume whatever's been done's been done wrong, otherwise I would not've been called here, cause I'm definitely not the cheapest option"
No, but they're selling remote wipe to large enterprise customers on worker's device's, spying on workers privacy and selling that info to management, adding DRM to excel spreadsheets - but they just can't figure out how to have multiple customers editing the same document without losing data.
I've worked on a place where somehow Teams managed to f@ck double clicking on an excel spreadsheet. Across organizations. On a sensitive critical infrastructure planning document.
"we sell you 4 different communications and productivity enhancement software products, none of those are really any good but guess what, we managed to upsell your organization into purchasing this crap "
Windows 10 alone has something like 200 individual settings for disabling its various forms of telemetry. Office adds several dozen more. Dotnet itself has telemetry, then PowerShell on top of that. VS Code and Visual Studio both send telemetry.
On and on, and on... and then some more, and on... and ON and ON and...
There's just no end to it.
As administrators, it's like playing whack-a-mole against a thousand moles that are breeding exponentially.
We don't want to play this game any more.