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What if I want to be the product? I could pay for Visual Studio Enterprise/Ultimate or whatever, or just accept that my usage is being tracked by MS. As long as they aren't being so egregious as to send the contents of my files, or sending over an unencrypted connection, I don't see why the makers of the product, offering it for free, can't track basic data.

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They're not offering it for free then, they're offering it in exchange for your data, and that should be made clear when you make that transaction. You can't have a fair economic exchange when one party is deceived about what the costs are to them.

Who's being deceived? As GP points out, it's in the privacy policy: "For pre-release and free versions of the software, users cannot opt out of usage data collection."

There isn't enough time in the day to read all the privacy policies and terms of service for all the things that we use. Just because something is written in the small print does not magically make it OK.

I agree mostly, but come on, whenever a big company like MS, Google etc puts this in privacy policy, anyone on HN learns about this pretty quick,and tbh I don't think anyone will upgrade to paid version for preventing basic usage data collection

Your data is a form of currency. Spend it however you wish.

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