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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

This is why it is a great idea to use VSCodium. An open source fork of VSCode that removes telemetry and packages itself for all major operating systems.

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium

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After installing VSCodium, you must manually disable telemetry in your settings file to stop it from sending tracking data to Microsoft.

https://github.com/VSCodium/vscodium#getting-all-the-telemet...

Even though we do not pass the telemetry build flags (and go out of our way to cripple the baked-in telemetry), Microsoft will still track usage by default. After installing VSCodium, you must manually disable telemetry in your settings file to stop it from sending tracking data to Microsoft.

The instructions here and here help with disabling telemetry.

Good first issue for a new contributor?

That makes me wonder why they didn't just go all the way? Was there "advice" from MS to not do so?

By the scare quotes around “advice” do you mean threats? Since VSCode is Free Software, what has VSCodium done that opens them to litigation from Microsoft?

Not in the legal sense but more like a "if you would like to remain on good terms with the community, we really appreciate you doing X" sort of thing.

What does that even mean?

There are no strict limits on paranoia... Maybe Satya Nadella threatened to literally murder everyone involved with VSCodium.

So what they write here [1] about the OSS version with stripped telemetry is not correct then?

[1]https://github.com/flathub/com.visualstudio.code.oss/issues/...

I am so tired of having to do this with every shiny new thing. I get on board, stop paying attention for a few months, and then have to hunt down the latest third-party abstraction to enable a common sense security/maintainability/accessibility mindset. God bless them for fixing the problem, but this is just exhausting.

You could also just use a competent editor that isn't made by a company who 'needs' to collect 'telemetry' from all their users. Playing a game of cat and mouse is not going to convince MS to stop being evil.

To be fair, this is an industry-wide disease. Jetbrains now tracks you too.

I thought jetbrains telemetry is opt in and not opt out. Is that no longer the case?

Iirc I got a popup asking about it at every update for a while (which means every month or so), until I eventually gave in.

I'm OK with Jetbrains getting my telemetry. I'm not OK with Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc getting it. JetBrains isn't going to try to make money off of my data and will actually use it to improve their product. The giants own search engines, try to make money off my data, try to bombard me with products elsewhere on the web based on my data, and have all been served NSLs numerous times so are under unknown orders from the gov to do who knows what with my data.

Unfortunately vscode hits that sweet spot that only Atom comes close to.

I had no idea this existed. Thanks!

Holy moly true pro tip. Thanks good person!!!

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