They have certainly changed – the .NET installer used to ask if you wouldn't mind participating in their product improvement program by sending data to Microsof

They have certainly changed – the .NET installer used to ask if you wouldn't mind participating in their product improvement program by sending data to Microsoft (defaulting to disabled by default), but now .NET Core will send your data to Microsoft by default without asking: https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/3093 https://github.com/dotnet/cli/issues/3093 The data is supposedly anonymized, except sometimes (according to comments on above-mentioned issue) when it accidentally isn't. You can also disable it, except when the disabling mechanism is accidentally broken.