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Comment by ttctciyf | Hacker News Reader

Found this while looking for a way to fully disable telemetry on vscode.

After reading, this seems impossible, short of going down to DNS or network blocks of some kind: the "disable telemetry" setting doesn't; extensions have their own telemetry; MS consider the data sufficiently anonymous to be exempt from GDPR, even the vscodium maintainers say they found it impossible to block vs code's eager telemetrizing.

I wonder what is the most effective way of actually completely stopping it phoning home, apart from yanking its ethernet cable?

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You can always simply install a better text editor that doesn't spy on you.

Very true. But I have specific reasons for wanting to use vs code in this instance.

What better text editor?

On windows notepad++ was my goto for basic text editing. These days I use the jetbrains editor of choice for the language in question or IntelliJ for basic text.

Emacs or *vim

And even if you don't like fiddling with dotfiles you can install some really nice distribution like spacemacs or doom for emacs and lunar for neovim. They have a pleasant dev experience out of the box.

There are much better IDEs. Check out the Jetbrains products. If you want an editor on Mac there is also Nova:

https://nova.app

The Rust and web related extensions work pretty well. I've been using that for a while.

There are a few more around.

I use IntelliJ for $dayjob, and while I love it, it too submits telemetry. I do not know how pervasive it is, but the controls for it are not obvious in the general config window.

The only way to really escape telemetry today is a local firewall that can block network access by application.

I would like to see some analysis of the telemetry Jetbrains sends and whether you can turn it off. It's a paid pro IDE so it wouldn't surprise me if you can really disable it because some commercial customers will not want telemetry. In high security environments it's often considered bad due to the possibility of accidentally exposing secret information.

Yeah, I almost mentioned IntelliJ, as an IDE it's almost unmatched.

I wonder what is the most effective way of actually completely stopping it phoning home, apart from yanking its ethernet cable?

Use your operating system's firewall app to block all outbound connections from it.

I was thinking of blocking its endpoints, except I don't know what they are.

I wasn't aware I could configure firewall rules for specific applications. Any hints where I could start looking at that?

even the vscodium maintainers say they found it impossible to block vs code's eager telemetrizing

Source for this? Does VSCodium with no extensions send telemetry, or is it the extension issue?

EDIT: Oh the quote from VSCodium is in the article:

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.

The funny thing is that I was about to install VSCodium for the first time TODAY, because I want live markdown preview. (I want a doc editor, not necessarily a code editor)

The rationale for VSCodium says it's about telemetry, although strictly speaking it's doesn't promise they removed all the telemetry!

https://vscodium.com/

but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking

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I should also say that on the dev side, crash reports are EXTREMELY useful and really do improve the quality of the software. But you used to have to confirm this data would be sent.

I've been using vscodium for the most part but you cannot avoid the extensions themselves sending their own telemetry.

You absolutely can lock down what permissions your vscodium has, and what it can talk to.

https://vscodium.com/

They said even the vscodium maintainers say they found it impossible to block vs code's eager telemetrizing.

host files?

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