As a VSCode extension creator - thank you! People may not realize how hard it is to make a great app if you have no idea what your users are doing with it.
On web apps there is all kinds of tracking and it’s heavily used to make the apps better (not just for marketing or annoying you). In a code editor extension there is the same need for that type of information, and telemetry is the only way to get it.
Tell me what's in the telemetry and I might approve it.
Don't tell me what you're collecting and I'm suspicious.
Things I should know about:
- my usernames
- name of the files I'm working on
- what other extensions I use
- what kind of computer I'm using
Or summarized : everything that can be used to fingerprint me.
And whatever your promises, I won't trust you with this data, it's not personal but your company might be bought tomorrow by another company that won't have to respect your promises.
Unfortunately I don't think it fits any of the projects I work on (and I don't use VSCode to begin with, never had it installed, bit I do see an IntelliJ plugin as well).
I have one project that's a server application (https://github.com/grishka/Smithereen), but since it uses lots of custom stuff on top of the Spark micro-framework, your plugin would probably not work on it. I imagine it does expect projects to be structured idiomatically for the framework they use, at least to some degree. Spark also doesn't know anything about databases, so that is all custom as well. Oh and I also hacked it a bit with reflection to allow streaming responses.
On web apps there is all kinds of tracking and it’s heavily used to make the apps better (not just for marketing or annoying you). In a code editor extension there is the same need for that type of information, and telemetry is the only way to get it.