VS Code is not what it seems

It is often implied that telemetry is a universally bad thing.

If it is anomymized properly, I think its actually a good thing to base decisions on which functionality to improve and which bugs to fix on the usage patterns of the "silent majority" of users and not necessarily on the opinions of the vocal minority engaging with the devs in GitHub issues. There are many prominent examples of major products which were primarily driven by the interests of their developers and not the users, leading ultimately to their demise (e.g. Eclipse).

It really cracks me up that a site complaining about telemetry shows 21 trackers[1] when I visit with privacy badger enabled. I actually suspect there are a couple more, because my current browser is pretty freshly installed so privacy badger is still discovering its trackers list.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/PtpGma2.png