I'd like to express the same sentiment against all-pervasive telemetry in a far less civil way but dont want this comment deleted.

I really wish I could use stronger language though....

This

If you're interested in collecting feedback and passing it on, the other criticism I have in this area is that Microsoft's privacy policies are incomprehensible. Everything seems to refer to the same huge document in the first instance and that document seems to depend by reference on numerous supporting documents. Even figuring out which supporting documents might be relevant seems to require understanding ambiguous terminology about whether any given application or service fits into various categories.

Personally, I'm not interested in messing around with that kind of nonsense. I don't want to engage a lawyer just to find out if I can safely run some software and in the modern world where we're dealing with things like personal data and sensitive business information (including code and clients' proprietary information used to write it) an organisation with Microsoft's recent track record on privacy isn't going to get the benefit of the doubt.

With all this backlash on telemetry, is it worth it? What are you actually getting from it beside ruining the progress MS has made with the dev community? Trust is hard to earn and takes seconds to lose.

Remove it. Then champion removing it from the rest of MS’s products. If you must spy to learn your market, you should not be in that market.

I still hold onto a Sublime Text license waiting for the day MS shows it’s true purpose of making VS code free. Has this day come?

Telemetry is like bureaucracy. Once you have one it's extremely difficult to get rid of it.

Please don't flame people like this on HN. Regardless of how strongly you dislike or disagree with $BigCo, we want HN to be a place where people with inside knowledge can speak freely about what they know, without being attacked for it. It would be a bad outcome for HN to disincentivize this. Past explanations of this point: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=disincent%20by:dang&dateRange=....

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've been posting a ton of unsubstantive and flamebait comments, most if not all of which are on this same theme, and you've been doing it for a long time. We ban accounts that do that sort of thing, so please don't do it any more. (No, we don't care about $BigCo. We care about keeping discussion here out of the shallow-flamewar end of the pool.)

Edit 2: I just noticed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28814819 - appreciated.

This comment isn't constructive at all. Keep it on topic and don't blame the messenger.

Sorry, I take it back, but I don't have access to the delete button.

You can’t delete comments once they have been replied to. Just take the feedback into account for next time, I guess.