this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
294 points (95.1% liked)
Technology
59596 readers
4799 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It is very difficult to tell if a program is respecting user's privacy without the source code to verify what it's actually doing. When you can't see or change what it does then the developer is the one in control of the computing, and even a good intentioned dev will have to resist the temptation to gain at the user's expense.
VSCode is open source and yet Microsoft still pushes telemetry crap into it.
One advantage of FOSS is that you can fork it! VSCodium (presumably, I never really checked) takes all of the crapware out of VSCode.
Being open source doesn't prevent the software being made with features one may dislike. It does mean you can actually investigate what data is being collected and decide if it shouldn't be doing that.
When I have installed Windows I've clicked "no" many questions asking if I was X feature on, and I could only hope it was respecting my wishes. It was probably still collecting data it didn't even ask me if I could turn off.