It’s unfortunate to see Microsoft (along with Adobe, etc) expanding into Ads. If nothing else, they could really differentiate and join forces with Apple from privacy standpoint to oppose Google, Amazon and Facebook.

Instead, “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”. Ah, like a true Ad company. Don’t get me started on Windows 10 telemetry.

I really believe that Apple’s bet on privacy will pay off well in the long term. They’re different companies (Apple is selling hardware) but boy they could have gone into Ads with a MASSIVE user base but they chose to limit Ads in the App Store. It would have been huge expansion opportunity but they didn’t pursue it. And it will pay off as privacy awareness spreads and Microsoft could join them as operating system providers.

> “Intellisense with AI now available on VS Code” is Microsoft’s nice way of saying “We harvest the shit out of your data”.

What? The IntelliCode description says that "Contextual recommendations are based on practices developed in thousands of high quality, open-source projects on GitHub each with high star ratings.". I'm not clear on how you think Microsoft will harvest data from doing this - much less how it is related to ads.

There is telemetry built into VS Code that you can turn off, but it is turned on by default. There is no way to know how they're using that data. Microsoft also collects data on Office365 platform and even local Office 2019 installs.

I was trying was to make a tongue in cheek point, rather than specifically digging into exact methods of how they collect data. You may be right but it is besides the core issue we are discussing here.

At the end, it is irrelevant how they're collecting data - all you need to know is this: https://about.ads.microsoft.com/en-us

We don't do any training on your data. Telemetry is largely for feature use tracking (eg we should really do better around this component, everyone is using it). There is absolutely no ads overlap at all. Literally none.

Disclosure: I work at Azure but not on VS Code

Is there a way we can see what data specifically is being sent to your servers from our local VSCode installations?

(Disclaimer, work at Microsoft. Not on VS Code.) I expect you should be able to run Fiddler or Wireshark or similar traffic sniffers to see the requests.

This assumes, of course, that y'all aren't doing any weird code-injecting funny business when packaging it up for installation :)