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Comment by Gaelan | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason this matters? Besides the automatic reaction of "data = evil" that I'm seeing, I see no reason why it even remotely matters that this data gets out.* I see no practical way MS could benefit from this other than by improving the open source project. Maybe if they reallly wanted to they could link your IP to a Facebook/Google account so you could get ads for developer tools? Is there actually a good reason to turn this off?

* I'm assuming MS is being honest about what they're collecting in their documentation. If someone has evidence that their sources/binaries say something different, feel free to bring it up.

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> I see no practical way MS could benefit from this other than by improving the open source project.

Then why don't they make it opt in?

> Is there actually a good reason to turn this off?

Security. In the sense of "enable only needed features, to reduce attack surface".

Of course it would be even better to not have it turned on by default in the first place.

Microsoft comes from a place of being automatically distrusted by a lot of people, and for good reason. It may seem unfair to you, but they have to conduct better than this to make up for this disadvantage.

> Then why don't they make it opt in?

Perhaps because they think it is a reasonable default that few people will want to change (vocal minorities and all that)? Curious if anybody who does opt-in telemetrics has stats on first-time downloads vs telemetry enables.

> Security. In the sense of "enable only needed features, to reduce attack surface".

I’d assume that the attack surface here is pretty small (HTTPS request via the standard mechanism, ignore the response). If .NET HTTPS APIs are broken, we’ve got bigger problems. At the end of the day, everything is a cost/benefit, and it seems like this is something pretty hard to get wrong + pretty large tangible benefit for the project.

> Then why don't they make it opt in?

Because opt-in telemetry doesn't really improve the open source project. It no longer provides a representative sample of the usage patterns in your app that you can use to guide your further development or maintenance efforts; the people that would opt-in majorly overlap with the people who are also willing to file issues and seek help channels.

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