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Has VS Code still the phone home feature, that can't be turned off? (no it's not okay to sniff on my data or usage, on my computer!)

It can be turned off now:

Only by manually editing internal program files using the command line. Also,

> You will need to apply these changes after every update to disable collection of usage data. These changes do not survive product updates.

The Feb 2016 release has a new setting that (I believe) persists between updates:

If you build from source, osscode will never connect to those endpoints.

Alternatively, you can just edit them out of the product.json from the release build that you download from MS.