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Comment by jlgaddis | Hacker News Reader

If you don't want PowerShell reporting your activities back to the mothership, don't forget to set

  POWERSHELL_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1

in your environment before launching PowerShell!

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I was just thinking "could this be it? Another Microsoft product that I start voluntarily using? (besides VSCode)" and then I go to the comments and the first comment I see reveals the Microsoft stink.

VSCode has telemetry too. https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/getstarted/telemetry

Oh yeah, I know, but I expect that from a big electron app and it asked me if I wanted to opt out on first launch. This is the same way Firefox and many other respectable programs do it and I see no problem with that.

But putting it in a shell with no prompt and only an unset environment variable to disable it, that's more like the Microsoft we all know.

There was a notice when I launched it first time.

Alright, that changes things. Back when I tried it (a while a go) I didn't get one, but if it's there now, I take back my complaint.

A shell with telemetry. Insane.

Wow... would have never thunk it

No, it's native 64-bit telemetry. No thunks necessary! This is the new Microsoft.

I see you what you did there! No pun intended on my part, hah.

Shellemetry, if you will.

Reminds me of a certain package manager with telemetry. Homebrew, was it?

Opt-out telemetry, specifically. Debian had popularity-contest (popcon) long ago, but it was voluntary (opt-in).

Regarding Homebrew, "Wonder if its GPDR complaint."

NixOS already did this at https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/74516

How often do you need to reapply this?

Set it in your environment / shell startup files (.bash_profile, for example)

  export POWERSHELL_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT=1

and, in theory, you should be good to go (unless/until Microsoft decides to change things up).

---

After logging out and logging in again, you can verify this has been set properly by simply running

  echo $POWERSHELL_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT

in your shell (it should simply output "1").

From the Microsoft website: “The telemetry reporting can be disabled by setting the environment variable POWERSHELL_TELEMETRY_OPTOUT to true, yes, or 1. This should not be done in your profile, as PowerShell reads this value from your system before executing your profile.”

It's not supposed to go into the PowerShell $profile; .bash_profile which later starts pwsh should be fine.

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