There's already a comment here, and I've also personally experienced just from talking with others offline, that a lot of people <i>don't even know</i> VSCode had telemetry, despite it mentioned several times in the product itself and its documentation. They (and remember, these people are supposedly <i>developers</i>) either ignored it, or just didn't read the docs.<p>I guess a big WARNING banner might scare users away, but it's still a bit disturbing to see such a lax attitude towards tools which developers use to work with a software company's most valuable assets. A lot of people, developers included, don't really read EULAs, and it's the same reason (traditional) spyware could thrive: no doubt they all specify in their license agreements the fact that they all collect information, but approximately no one reads those.<p>Put it another way, would you want your compiler or other parts of your toolchain sending information about all the source files it processed? I wouldn't consider myself particularly paranoid when it comes to security, maybe even looser than the average on HN, and even then I wouldn't use such tools. I wonder how many companies have already banned their use...