Issue #86 (Customizing Telemetry Data Collection)12/13/23
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As explained in their documentation, the VS Code team collects telemetry data, which, as they explain "is used to help understand how to improve the product." This is certainly understandable but a lot of people would prefer not to send any data of their usage of the product.
If you would prefer not to send any data to Microsoft about your use of VS Code, you can disable it using the setting
telemetry.telemetryLevel.
When you look up the setting, you'll see a handy chart, as shown above, that communicates what time of data is sent with each of the values for the setting.
There are three types of data sent:
- Crash Reports
- Error Telemetry
- Usage Data
So if you're slightly paranoid about sharing your data, you might choose the value "error", which covers both Error Telemetry and Crash Reports. This allows you to help the VS Code team make the product better, without sending more generic info.
But if you prefer to share nothing, then you would select the value "off", which disables sending any telemetry data to Microsoft.
One final important point to note about telemetry, as explained in the telemetry docs is the following quote about VS Code extensions:
These extensions may be collecting their own usage data and are not controlled by the telemetry.telemetryLevel setting. Consult the specific extension's documentation to learn about its telemetry reporting and whether it can be disabled.
That seems somewhat concerning that the global setting wouldn't affect how an extension collects data. So it's important to only install extensions that you trust and that have documentation that explains what, if anything, is collected.
Now on to this week's hand-picked links!
