Thank you for the further response. I'm not sure whether this is your area at work or you're just trying to help here, but as further feedback in return, that r

Thank you for the further response. I'm not sure whether this is your area at work or you're just trying to help here, but as further feedback in return, that reads like an opt-out scheme to me. I'm also immediately struck that this relies on a setting (which Microsoft products have a history of changing when installing later updates) and that we still haven't resolved whether VS Code has its own separate privacy policy (which is mentioned as a possibility in the generic Microsoft privacy statement we were discussing before, without any specific indication of how to determine the answer definitively or where it would be found if it exists). So again, while I appreciate that individuals involved may have honest intentions and be trying to help here, this is still a very long way from the kind of clear, unambiguous official statement that would make me trust any Microsoft product enough to use it in the current data-harvesting, forced-updates climate. I have specific legal obligations to clients when dealing with their source code and the proprietary knowledge implicit within it, and there's no way I can take this sort of documentation to my lawyer and say "Can I use this?".