And the latest version introduces many other data collection ways. Search them in settings with the keyword "online", you will find them all. Don't know whether or not there are other hidden ways which are not shown in the setting page.
We have looked into this, and haven't found an intentional change that should change your opt-out settings. This shouldn't happen.
We have two theories:
1) Your settings file was deleted, which means that you would have lost all of your settings, and not just the telemetry setting. This can happen if the AppData or ~/Library/Application Support was cleaned up.
2) One of your installed extensions updated the settings either accidentally or on purpose. This would require further debugging, and a list of your installed extensions.
To help debug this further, it would be great help if you could open an issue on Github, https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/, with more details about your OS, VS Code version and installed extensions, so we can figure out what happened.
Thanks!
/k
totally a bug
I also question how 'evil' policies like this could propagate across company divisions to the point where they are actually implemented in code—in today's age where engineers have a lot of agency over what they do and often speak up—without someone leaking said policy.
This is just a conspiracy theory.
Not necessarily malicious - just myopic.