Re:VSCodium – Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS...
by eterevsky on Friday June 03, 2022 @07:11AM
(#31606783)
If this weren't legal I doubt it would've been distributed the way it is.
Re:VSCodium – Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS...
by danieldk on Friday June 03, 2022 @10:03AM
(#31608429)
I think that is somewhat naive. The general approach of big tech has been: let's just break the rules until we get a slap on the wrist. It's not like privacy authorities are going to charge them with 4% of the annual turnover the first time. Besides that, they probably have bigger fish to fry than some program that is used by a tiny subset of the general population.
Re:VSCodium – Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS...
by eterevsky on Saturday June 04, 2022 @02:59AM
(#31617754)
As someone working in big tech, this is very far from truth. In any questionable case there are endless legal and privacy reviews that catch 99% of possible transgressions. What you see is the 1% that slipped through this process.
> Besides that, they probably have bigger fish to fry than some program that is used by a tiny subset of the general population.
That's exactly the reason why MS would be on the safe side and not break any laws in this case. They could be a bit more daring if it benefitted them, but in this case there's literally no benefit except improving the software that they are giving out for free.
IANAL, but if you make the product available in the EU, you are required to make telemetry opt-in if there is personally identifiable information, or you'll violate the GDPR. Note that according to interpretations of various EU bodies, PII also means information that could be correlated to persons, like randomly generated identifiers (not just obviously PII information like an e-mail address or IP address).