Data collection license clarification

[jonkri]

This is a quote from the software license terms (emphasis mine):

Data Collection. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation.

I could not find the product documentation referenced to. I would like to suggest a clarification in the license terms that explains clearly, or points to a resource explaining clearly, what scenarios that a user cannot opt-out of.

Thank you!

[kieferrm]

@jonkri the software license terms link to the FAQ.

We updated the FAQ in the telemetry section by calling out more explicitly that telemetry is collected until you disable it. This implies you can't opt-out to what happens before you opt-out such as the telemetry we send about the startup performance of VS Code. We also added a sentence about how you can get more insights into what is sent.

Let us know if that clarified things. Thanks!

[ghost]

@kieferrm can you point to the source code here that does the data collection? after reading this article I am inclined to never use this product again:

https://carlchenet.com/you-think-the-visual-studio-code-binary-you-use-is-a-free-software-think-again/

[kieferrm]

@cup All telemetry events are in our OSS source code. #34997 was the PR that initially introduced source code annotations for all telemetry events. Inside VS Code, you can also see in real-time what telemetry events we send. This is from our FAQ:

You can inspect telemetry events in the Output panel by setting the log level to Trace using Developer: Set Log Level from the Command Palette.

The only telemetry information that is not in this repo is the telemetry endpoint.