Bet it contains telemetry!

How does a forum mostly made of software engineers hate opt-out telemetry so much? How do you know how well your software is doing in the wild without knowing about 1) Crashes with stack traces 2) which features actually get clicked on. How do you make decisions without this information?

Example - Mozilla is going to remove support for TLS 1.0 and 1.1 [1]. A good change, we can all agree. But what if half their user base was relying on this feature? Can they still remove it? Should they commission a user survey asking everyday users about TLS? Fortunately, they have telemetry that tells them that only 1.2% of all connections are made with these versions of TLS. Cool, this change can go ahead.

If you were in charge at Mozilla and you don't want to collect opt-out telemetry, please tell me how you would have made the TLS decision.

Literally what are you scared of that telemetry will send? If you're so concerned about it, why don't you just opt out?

[1] - https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2018/10/15/removing-old-ve...

> Literally what are you scared of that telemetry will send?

This is dangerously close to a “nothing to hide” argument. The issue with telemetry is that it’s difficult to do it right, and often it ends up just siphoning data that ends up being abused or mishandled. Having this be opt-in raises questions of consent.

If you think there is something that it might upload that you might not like, please let us know. Here's the extension - https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-extension-telemetry. You can check for usages here - https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode

There is plenty of personal information that I never want shared with anyone, like my location history, who I speak to and so on. But what shortcuts I use, what features I use in an application, after it's been anonymized? I have "nothing to hide" there.