Clarification On Data Collection

[john01dav]

The license for binary distributions has the following in it (emphasis mine):

a. Data Collection. The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. You may opt-out of many of these scenarios, but not all, as described in the product documentation. There are also some features in the software that may enable you and Microsoft to collect data from users of your applications. If you use these features, you must comply with applicable law, including providing appropriate notices to users of your applications together with a copy of Microsoft’s privacy statement. Our privacy statement is located at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=824704. You can learn more about data collection and use in the help documentation and our privacy statement. Your use of the software operates as your consent to these practices. b. Processing of Personal Data. To the extent Microsoft is a processor or subprocessor of personal data in connection with the software, Microsoft makes the commitments in the European Union General Data Protection Regulation Terms of the Online Services Terms to all customers effective May 25, 2018, at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9840733.

Yet the documentation that I can see (e.g. README.md) does not document what, exactly, is collected and what can and can not be disabled. Such information is vital for me to make an informed decision about using or not using this software.

[jmarolf]

All the code that reports telemetry is here

We collect the following info: https://github.com/OmniSharp/omnisharp-vscode/blob/71203748f5c042f4b126ffef0bb03ad68766811e/src/observers/TelemetryObserver.ts#L104-L114

• SolutionId, ProjectId, and SessionId are hashes that do not contain personal info but can be used to track if events in telemetry events came from the same instance. here is where the hashing of these items is done.
• References, and FileExtensions are also hashed. These hashes can be reversed for known references (like mscorlib.dll) but not for dlls that are unique to your project. This is generally used to analyze what the of projects people are using look like. I recently made a change to caching behavior in the C# compiler based on this info.
• FileCounts the number of files, also useful when determining what internal compiler caches should be.
• OutputType, ProjectCapabilities, and TargetFrameworks are all info on what sort of assembly is being generated. This is used to track what sorts of projects users are using (how many folks used web projects this months etc.)
• NetSdkVersion the version of the sdk you are using to build. It helps us track how quickly new .NET SDKs are being adopted.