> They (and remember, these people are supposedly developers) either ignored it, or just didn't read the docs.
Or they forgot and their stance on it changed. I vaguely remembered (or thought I did) having seen it. Just checked my settings and it's disabled. I've gotten way more privacy minded in the last 24 months, so I figured I might have said "yeah, you can collect data" back when I first installed it, but now I'd prefer they didn't.
A middle way would be to periodically remind people, "hey, you've consented to sending anonymous usage data to us so we can make better decisions. I just wanted to confirm that you're still cool with this" once a year or something, because at least for me, "does this app collect telemetry data?" is not something I constantly have in my working memory.
> A middle way would be to periodically remind people ...
Almost nobody will do this because, if they do, they know people will turn it off. It's the same reason commonly given for making tracking (or "telemetry", as they call it) opt-out and on by default, instead of requiring users to opt-in -- "if we have it off by default and ask users to enable it, pretty much nobody will".
They may very well be correct but, to me, that doesn't make it okay.
Yeah, I believe you're right. It might be a matter of framing. If you show me the value of collecting telemetry data, what good decisions you've made because of it, how you got rid of that annoying thing plenty of users complained about because you saw that it affected a large group of users and wasn't just a loud dozen etc, you might sell it to me.
Most data collection for "analytics" is just about you as the product owner optimizing the product for whatever goal you want to, engagement, sales, ad clicks, retention or what have you. I as a user that provides the data gain nothing from that and, being the target of those manipulations, I might actually lose (by spending more time on your site than I wanted to etc), but if you can show that I give data = I get better product, I don't think I'd be that hard to convince.
I don't know if VS Code does something in that regard (if they do, they don't communicate it effectively enough to reach me), but I do like their approach in general - I once read through an issue where they discussed changing some component for a more advanced one and pretty much everybody agreed that the newer one was better, but they still had a few words on "how can we measure that? how can we make sure that it's not just us devs that work on this thing all day and it won't be the same for the people using it in their daily life on all kinds of experience levels". I liked that a lot (so much so that I still remember it months after reading), but apparently not quite enough to enable telemetry data ;)
I have it enabled on my personal computer, but disabled on my work computer. I like them improving their product, so I want to support that, but at work it's a bit different.
Or they forgot and their stance on it changed. I vaguely remembered (or thought I did) having seen it. Just checked my settings and it's disabled. I've gotten way more privacy minded in the last 24 months, so I figured I might have said "yeah, you can collect data" back when I first installed it, but now I'd prefer they didn't.
A middle way would be to periodically remind people, "hey, you've consented to sending anonymous usage data to us so we can make better decisions. I just wanted to confirm that you're still cool with this" once a year or something, because at least for me, "does this app collect telemetry data?" is not something I constantly have in my working memory.