How VS Code is tracking you and how to prevent it

Visual Studio Code has telemetry incorporated according to this comment from one of its maintainers:

When we build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.

https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode/issues/60#issuecomment-161792005

Telemetry is the collection of data at remote points and their automatic transmission to receiving equipment for monitoring.

Stop VSCode tracking

You can avoid all this if you use VS Codium. It’s basically the same VS Code cloned from the same VS Code repo except it’s built without Microsoft’s branding and tracking.

https://vscodium.com

It’s simple to install VS Codium on macOS if you’re already using Homebrew. You just need to run:

brew cask install vscodium

I think it makes sense to use it if you’re too worried about VS Code tracking you. However, this information surely allows Microsoft to see where users spend more time or which features they use more and which ones less, and make decisions to push the product forward in one area or another. In the end, it’s valuable not only for Microsoft but also for the end user.