7 ms·

This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and Gi

This is a dumb take. They're both equally untrustworthy. VSCode has an insane amount of telemetry turned on, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type, and GitHub was abused to train a LLM. Microsoft and Google have both shown they would sell your data in a heartbeat to make a quick buck.

scrollaway 3y ago
You’re comparing vscode telemetry with “selling your data”? For real? Do you think the amount of time you spend in the File menu is as monetizable as your search history?
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  It's quite valuable to vendors who are trying to gauge usage and interest, yes.
  - scrollaway 3y ago
    … what? I don’t even know how to find common ground with such a take. You’re saying vscode telemetry (which can be turned off by the way) is as bad as other data monetization because building a better product is profitable? I hope I completely misunderstood you.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    It's valuable to Microsoft, but why would anybody else want to pay for data about the usage of a Microsoft product? And why would Microsoft sell it? Like would you want to sell information like "X% of users can't figure out how to change the code formatting settings"? Or if you did learn something cool and useful, why would you sell it to the potential competition?
    - adventured 3y ago
      A lot of tech companies would pay for that vast trove of user data. There are possibly no better sources on usage for mass consumer software than what Microsoft has from the past few decades (Office and Windows in particular; the next best would be browsers and or various Apple software). Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay for access to that, assuming the cost is reasonable. Vendors desperately want access to it. Microsoft would be crazy to sell it openly. Its part of their competitive advantage, helping to protect $83 billion in operating income. They'd get tiny particles of revenue in comparison to the gigantic golden egg they're sitting on.
      - dale_glass 3y ago
        Data isn't intrinsically valuable, useful data is. I can't imagine a lot of cases where telemetry would be on sale. On one hand, telemetry is specific to a specific product. Knowing how often people use the File menu in Visual Studio doesn't help me with my own application that much. On the other hand, telemetry is potentially a boon to the competition. Can you imagine if say, the LibreOffice project could buy MS Office telemetry to better decide what features to implement, or just to embarrass Microsoft by revealing how much something crashes? For me, pretty much all telemetry seems to fall into one of those two boxes -- either useless because I'm not working on a clone, or useful and MS would be nuts to sell the info to me because I am working on a clone. > Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay for access to that, assuming the cost is reasonable. Vendors desperately want access to it. But Walmart would be crazy to sell it as-is, because why would they help their competition optimize their store layouts/warehousing? At best, I think Walmart might want to sell a derived service, like a slow trickle of recommendations to improve sales. Not the actual underlying data.
    - derefr 3y ago
      You know those preinstalled-but-not-really app ads that are in the Start Menu, for Candy Crush and the like? How much do you think those are worth — what's the right CPM for them? (And yes, these are adspace, with CPM costs — even if you never click+install Candy Crush from the start menu, you're still being reminded of its existence every time you open the start menu, so the impressions are valuable, not just the conversions.) Microsoft knows the right CPM for these, because of their telemetry about start-menu usage. And while Microsoft isn't selling that information, per se, they are giving it to partners who consider running one of those ads.
      - scrollaway 3y ago
        Okay but that’s indirect effects. Telemetry isn’t what’s valuable in your example — the ad is. Everything you do as a company, that creates value, also indirectly helps your ad prices if you start selling ads. That is the Google strategy: they used to deliver immense value with little monetization and now the balance has changed. Having an issue with this with that reasoning is akin to having an issue with a company creating anything of value.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bastardoperator 3y ago
Ehh, I think this is also a bad take. Turn off telemetry, delete ChatGPT conversations, and I like having an LLM for GitHub versus Give us all your personal data and we're sharing it with ad partners, your personal data is our number one product and secondary products are only made to support the first endeavor.
- Permit 3y ago
  > sharing it with ad partners, What do you mean by this? What kind of information do advertisers get to receive?
  - _nalply 3y ago
    Corporate has data about people. For example, if you plan a holiday, Google, Meta, and others know it. If your wife suffers from a serious condition, Google, Meta, and others know it. Corporate has extensive databases and every person is potentially profiled with a lot of detail. Advertisers don't usually receive detailed information, instead they are promised that their advertisements are targeted correctly. To do that the data about people is used. But with this data Corporate gets too much power. Corporate needs to follow Human Rights, like states. One aspect is that there is no due process in case of conflicts, like someone being wrongly excluded from using a Corporate service. We also need transparency about how this data is used exactly and who else gets views. Europe is trying to establish transparency with the GDPR, however is foiled by malicious compliance by Corporate. It does not help that Europe is clumsy.
  - tadfisher 3y ago
    None, because the data asymmetry is how Google earns revenue. If they just sold the data, you'd set up a competing ad network that undercuts AdSense by operating on slightly outdated snapshots.
    - hedora 3y ago
      This is why they charge third parties to run unauditable google-provided code on top of your data instead. Also, they sell provide it governments in the form of warrant requests. For more info, read up in google ad auction fraud, and google location warrant. Microsoft is actually worse though. For one thing, Windows’ default telemetry level lets them pull files off your machine. Here’s a Microsoft apologist explaining it: https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-telemetry-secrets/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-telemetry-secrets/ The US CLOUD Act (which Microsoft lobbied for) means that they have to pull that data in response to US warrant requests, regardless of what country you are in. Also, they already merged mojang (minecraft) into the Microsoft login umbrella. It is clearly a dry run for when they merge linkedin and github in, so they can provide better worker surveillance capabilities to their corporate customers.
cypress66 3y ago
Github wasn't abused to train LLMs. Whatever website existed that openly hosted OSS repositories would have been scrapped if it had such a large number of repos. You don't need to be Microsoft to train on github.
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  The question is: How much private repos went into copilot? I guess for specific software (how to use a commercial database? How to use some enterprise framework?) they'd find more relevant samples there, which might be worthwhile scanning.
  - 542458 3y ago
    GitHub has always said that they only train on public repos. I don’t see why they’d lie about that - including private repos would only add a relatively small amount of data to the corpus and would risk alienating all their corporate customers. > GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilot/about-github-copilot-for-individuals#about-github-copilot https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...
    - sharminglkw 3y ago
      When copilot was originally released, I was able to get it to generate verbatim my extremely niche and poorly written code from a completely private repo. It was identifiable by the bad variable names that I used. I cant say they traines it on all pricate repos, but they definitely trained it on my private repos.
      - 542458 3y ago
        Did you reach out to any tech press figures or publicize this in any way? It would have been a fairly important story and should have been pretty easy for somebody else to reproduce by generating the same completions and comparing them to your commit history. I don’t mean to be dismissive but unless you did something like that or documented it in some way it’s hard to give too much weight to a “source: trust me” comment from a brand-new HN account.
logdap 3y ago
It's a product of sports-teams consumerism. People make affiliation with a sports team or corporate brand into part of their identity. When they fall out with one brand they feel compelled to fill the resulting void in their soul with another affiliation. That's why Google behaving badly prompts them to reconsider the merits of a completely different corporation.
jasfi 3y ago
Use VsCodium, telemetry is disabled. https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/
- chaxor 3y ago
  Or just simply vi and it's variants? Far better UX
  - lillecarl 3y ago
    The world disagrees with you [0] 0: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-worked-with-vs-want-to-work-with-integrated-development-environment https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-worked-with-vs...
    - dwaltrip 3y ago
      It’s amazing to me what percentage replied with “Notepad++”. To be fair, I haven’t tried it in like 15 years…
      - baq 3y ago
        It’s actually an amazing editor. Zero setup, does a lot of useful things out of the box, starts instantly. If that sounds like 15 years ago, it’s still true (high praise!) except it is more capable.
      - Xeamek 3y ago
        To be fair, it was 'select all that apply'. Personally I find it hard to believe that people use it as their default ides and write a lot of code in it. but dunno
    - canadiantim 3y ago
      That is a shockingly bad website for mobile. Whole screen is taken up by an uncloseable menu, jeez you would think stack overflow could get responsive design right.
    - 3y ago
bdcravens 3y ago
Meanwhile the development world has more or less shrugged its shoulders. The mass exodus of Github never happened, and aside from the dogmatic, VS Code seems to have a firm grasp on mindshare.
- 2devnull 3y ago
  As a daily vscode user, I can report that it doesn’t have my mindshare, I’ve just adopted a realism wrt Microsoft’s state sanctioned monopoly and need to get work done. It’s convenient only because msft can make it inconvenient not to use it. My feeling is more Stockholm Syndrome than one of msft earning my “mindshare.”
- paradox460 3y ago
  I moved from textmate to sublime to atom to vscode, and have had vim hovering in the background the whole time If something better than vsc comes along, I'll move to it
robertlagrant 3y ago
What do you mean, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type?
samch 3y ago
It’s worth noting that Microsoft offers enterprise/business variants of most solutions that are (more) private by design. This includes GitHub Copilot, Azure OpenAI GPT services, Bing Chat, M365 Copilot, etc. It’s really a consumer’s decision when it comes to Microsoft. Either you use the basic/free version in exchange for your privacy, or you pay for a business account. I’m not sure Google really offers that as equitably across their offerings. They seem more focused on driving their ad/data collection business rather than private, enterprise solutions (just my two cents).
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
exitheone 3y ago
That's a really bad take. Think about Google what you want but Google is never selling your data, it's far too valuable to sell. Advertisers never get to see any of it. The decision which ad is seen by whom is handled entirely inside Google and your data never leaves them.
accrual 3y ago
> ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type Any evidence to support this? Or did you mean everything you send which would be completely expected and normal per their terms? I see no IP traffic when typing but not sending data to ChatGPT. I think you could only do this by caching the characters and mixing them in with later queries, but that behavior should be visible in the client side code.
xnx 3y ago
Google sells your attention, not your data.

scrollaway 3y ago

You’re comparing vscode telemetry with “selling your data”? For real? Do you think the amount of time you spend in the File menu is as monetizable as your search history?

candiddevmike 3y ago
It's quite valuable to vendors who are trying to gauge usage and interest, yes.
- scrollaway 3y ago
  … what? I don’t even know how to find common ground with such a take. You’re saying vscode telemetry (which can be turned off by the way) is as bad as other data monetization because building a better product is profitable? I hope I completely misunderstood you.
- dale_glass 3y ago
  It's valuable to Microsoft, but why would anybody else want to pay for data about the usage of a Microsoft product? And why would Microsoft sell it? Like would you want to sell information like "X% of users can't figure out how to change the code formatting settings"? Or if you did learn something cool and useful, why would you sell it to the potential competition?
  - adventured 3y ago
    A lot of tech companies would pay for that vast trove of user data. There are possibly no better sources on usage for mass consumer software than what Microsoft has from the past few decades (Office and Windows in particular; the next best would be browsers and or various Apple software). Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay for access to that, assuming the cost is reasonable. Vendors desperately want access to it. Microsoft would be crazy to sell it openly. Its part of their competitive advantage, helping to protect $83 billion in operating income. They'd get tiny particles of revenue in comparison to the gigantic golden egg they're sitting on.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      Data isn't intrinsically valuable, useful data is. I can't imagine a lot of cases where telemetry would be on sale. On one hand, telemetry is specific to a specific product. Knowing how often people use the File menu in Visual Studio doesn't help me with my own application that much. On the other hand, telemetry is potentially a boon to the competition. Can you imagine if say, the LibreOffice project could buy MS Office telemetry to better decide what features to implement, or just to embarrass Microsoft by revealing how much something crashes? For me, pretty much all telemetry seems to fall into one of those two boxes -- either useless because I'm not working on a clone, or useful and MS would be nuts to sell the info to me because I am working on a clone. > Why would anybody pay for customer traffic/browsing/shopping data for inside of a Walmart store? Nearly every retailer would pay for access to that, assuming the cost is reasonable. Vendors desperately want access to it. But Walmart would be crazy to sell it as-is, because why would they help their competition optimize their store layouts/warehousing? At best, I think Walmart might want to sell a derived service, like a slow trickle of recommendations to improve sales. Not the actual underlying data.
  - derefr 3y ago
    You know those preinstalled-but-not-really app ads that are in the Start Menu, for Candy Crush and the like? How much do you think those are worth — what's the right CPM for them? (And yes, these are adspace, with CPM costs — even if you never click+install Candy Crush from the start menu, you're still being reminded of its existence every time you open the start menu, so the impressions are valuable, not just the conversions.) Microsoft knows the right CPM for these, because of their telemetry about start-menu usage. And while Microsoft isn't selling that information, per se, they are giving it to partners who consider running one of those ads.
    - scrollaway 3y ago
      Okay but that’s indirect effects. Telemetry isn’t what’s valuable in your example — the ad is. Everything you do as a company, that creates value, also indirectly helps your ad prices if you start selling ads. That is the Google strategy: they used to deliver immense value with little monetization and now the balance has changed. Having an issue with this with that reasoning is akin to having an issue with a company creating anything of value.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bastardoperator 3y ago

Ehh, I think this is also a bad take. Turn off telemetry, delete ChatGPT conversations, and I like having an LLM for GitHub versus Give us all your personal data and we're sharing it with ad partners, your personal data is our number one product and secondary products are only made to support the first endeavor.

Permit 3y ago
> sharing it with ad partners, What do you mean by this? What kind of information do advertisers get to receive?
- _nalply 3y ago
  Corporate has data about people. For example, if you plan a holiday, Google, Meta, and others know it. If your wife suffers from a serious condition, Google, Meta, and others know it. Corporate has extensive databases and every person is potentially profiled with a lot of detail. Advertisers don't usually receive detailed information, instead they are promised that their advertisements are targeted correctly. To do that the data about people is used. But with this data Corporate gets too much power. Corporate needs to follow Human Rights, like states. One aspect is that there is no due process in case of conflicts, like someone being wrongly excluded from using a Corporate service. We also need transparency about how this data is used exactly and who else gets views. Europe is trying to establish transparency with the GDPR, however is foiled by malicious compliance by Corporate. It does not help that Europe is clumsy.
- tadfisher 3y ago
  None, because the data asymmetry is how Google earns revenue. If they just sold the data, you'd set up a competing ad network that undercuts AdSense by operating on slightly outdated snapshots.
  - hedora 3y ago
    This is why they charge third parties to run unauditable google-provided code on top of your data instead. Also, they sell provide it governments in the form of warrant requests. For more info, read up in google ad auction fraud, and google location warrant. Microsoft is actually worse though. For one thing, Windows’ default telemetry level lets them pull files off your machine. Here’s a Microsoft apologist explaining it: https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-telemetry-secrets/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-telemetry-secrets/ The US CLOUD Act (which Microsoft lobbied for) means that they have to pull that data in response to US warrant requests, regardless of what country you are in. Also, they already merged mojang (minecraft) into the Microsoft login umbrella. It is clearly a dry run for when they merge linkedin and github in, so they can provide better worker surveillance capabilities to their corporate customers.

cypress66 3y ago

Github wasn't abused to train LLMs. Whatever website existed that openly hosted OSS repositories would have been scrapped if it had such a large number of repos. You don't need to be Microsoft to train on github.

johannes1234321 3y ago
The question is: How much private repos went into copilot? I guess for specific software (how to use a commercial database? How to use some enterprise framework?) they'd find more relevant samples there, which might be worthwhile scanning.
- 542458 3y ago
  GitHub has always said that they only train on public repos. I don’t see why they’d lie about that - including private repos would only add a relatively small amount of data to the corpus and would risk alienating all their corporate customers. > GitHub Copilot is trained on all languages that appear in public repositories https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilot/about-github-copilot-for-individuals#about-github-copilot https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/overview-of-github-copilo...
  - sharminglkw 3y ago
    When copilot was originally released, I was able to get it to generate verbatim my extremely niche and poorly written code from a completely private repo. It was identifiable by the bad variable names that I used. I cant say they traines it on all pricate repos, but they definitely trained it on my private repos.
    - 542458 3y ago
      Did you reach out to any tech press figures or publicize this in any way? It would have been a fairly important story and should have been pretty easy for somebody else to reproduce by generating the same completions and comparing them to your commit history. I don’t mean to be dismissive but unless you did something like that or documented it in some way it’s hard to give too much weight to a “source: trust me” comment from a brand-new HN account.

logdap 3y ago

It's a product of sports-teams consumerism. People make affiliation with a sports team or corporate brand into part of their identity. When they fall out with one brand they feel compelled to fill the resulting void in their soul with another affiliation. That's why Google behaving badly prompts them to reconsider the merits of a completely different corporation.

jasfi 3y ago

Use VsCodium, telemetry is disabled. https://vscodium.com/ https://vscodium.com/

chaxor 3y ago
Or just simply vi and it's variants? Far better UX
- lillecarl 3y ago
  The world disagrees with you [0] 0: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-worked-with-vs-want-to-work-with-integrated-development-environment https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-worked-with-vs...
  - dwaltrip 3y ago
    It’s amazing to me what percentage replied with “Notepad++”. To be fair, I haven’t tried it in like 15 years…
    - baq 3y ago
      It’s actually an amazing editor. Zero setup, does a lot of useful things out of the box, starts instantly. If that sounds like 15 years ago, it’s still true (high praise!) except it is more capable.
    - Xeamek 3y ago
      To be fair, it was 'select all that apply'. Personally I find it hard to believe that people use it as their default ides and write a lot of code in it. but dunno
  - canadiantim 3y ago
    That is a shockingly bad website for mobile. Whole screen is taken up by an uncloseable menu, jeez you would think stack overflow could get responsive design right.
  - 3y ago

bdcravens 3y ago

Meanwhile the development world has more or less shrugged its shoulders. The mass exodus of Github never happened, and aside from the dogmatic, VS Code seems to have a firm grasp on mindshare.

2devnull 3y ago
As a daily vscode user, I can report that it doesn’t have my mindshare, I’ve just adopted a realism wrt Microsoft’s state sanctioned monopoly and need to get work done. It’s convenient only because msft can make it inconvenient not to use it. My feeling is more Stockholm Syndrome than one of msft earning my “mindshare.”
paradox460 3y ago
I moved from textmate to sublime to atom to vscode, and have had vim hovering in the background the whole time If something better than vsc comes along, I'll move to it

robertlagrant 3y ago

What do you mean, ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type?

samch 3y ago

It’s worth noting that Microsoft offers enterprise/business variants of most solutions that are (more) private by design. This includes GitHub Copilot, Azure OpenAI GPT services, Bing Chat, M365 Copilot, etc. It’s really a consumer’s decision when it comes to Microsoft. Either you use the basic/free version in exchange for your privacy, or you pay for a business account. I’m not sure Google really offers that as equitably across their offerings. They seem more focused on driving their ad/data collection business rather than private, enterprise solutions (just my two cents).

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

exitheone 3y ago

That's a really bad take. Think about Google what you want but Google is never selling your data, it's far too valuable to sell. Advertisers never get to see any of it. The decision which ad is seen by whom is handled entirely inside Google and your data never leaves them.

accrual 3y ago

> ChatGPT is monitoring everything you type Any evidence to support this? Or did you mean everything you send which would be completely expected and normal per their terms? I see no IP traffic when typing but not sending data to ChatGPT. I think you could only do this by caching the characters and mixing them in with later queries, but that behavior should be visible in the client side code.

xnx 3y ago

Google sells your attention, not your data.