<moderator hat>Tone down your aggressive, negative posts. They are not constructive, and not welcome on the site. A little occasional frustration is fine, the steady stream of negativity is not.</moderator hat>

To try to address it, what specifically about telemetry do you object to? What specifically about the products do you dislike so we can think of products that might better fit?

Much of the telemetry in developer tools is quite good, things like crash or error reporting in tools so they can be fixed. Also, typically they provide options to turn it off. If you really don't like it or worry about more spying, you can use your firewall to disable outbound connections, block specific URLs / domains / IP addresses, or block them at your router/gateway box if it has decent functionality, most home hardware does.

It's certainly easy to be paranoid, “all telemetry is evil”, “they're spying on everything I do”, and there certainly are bad actors out in the world, but the reality is typically far more benign.

None of that is a direct answer to the questions that were asked.

ReignOnU said:
windows is bloatware and has telemetry.

Not an answer to what it is that you object to, nor what you want instead.

If you don't want to be on Windows, don't be on Windows. If you want to disconnect from the Internet, then disconnect from the Internet. Be aware that most Linux distros have telemetry systems at the OS level as well as many packages that report to their maintainers and creators, and Apple has more than Microsoft if you're looking in that direction.

Whatever major editor you use will also have telemetry for error reporting. Not all, but many.

All of them can be disabled or blocked if you're genuinely concerned and willing to do some work blocking ports and connections. In the worst case, disconnect the box entirely and use a sneaker-net to move files.

ReignOnU said:
i am assuming vs code's telemetry is there for ai to steal your code.

That also isn't what you object to, nor for what you're looking for, but it hints towards a concern.

I've never seen anything that confirms anything like a company using telemetry “for ai to steal your code”. I've read that VS Code contains usage data about features (more than some people like), crash info, and diagnostic reports. It's easy enough to enable logging on telemetry events in the system. You can turn off most of it, and port block the rest if desired. I've never seen anyone report that it is transmitting your code.

VSCodium is an alternative from the same code base, again with most but not all disabled. Many extensions and plugins also phone home and report their usage. There are some ai-based code snippit plugin tools that might, but they're easily avoided and never need to be downloaded.

Even so, I've not read anything confirming that as an actual concern in practice.

Most of what you wrote there looks like paranoia and ignorance more than anything. If you're that paranoid, install WireShark or otherwise track it through your network, or just turn off computers forever. Lots of people have studied what is transmitted, have reported what they've found, and lots of security groups have written about it. Some of it was undocumented, some of it can't easily be turned off and needs to be blocked if you're concerned, but it isn't what you describe.

If you've actually read what they wrote and reached your own conclusions, or have measured for yourself, those conclusions are your own to draw. For some people even a single byte about a crash is too much information. Everything I've seen out there is that it is exactly what is described: a bunch of data about how the products are used to monitor features and functionality, and crash/error reports.

In what you wrote I see a lot of “it might” it “maybe they did”, but nothing that says “this was found”. People who actively track and hunt that kind of thing don't see it go over the wire. Sure, it's possible they're using advanced stealth techniques like timing patterns to quietly syphon away people's intellectual property for nefarious purposes. It's also possible barn owls did a lot of work and prehistoric engineering to coerce humans to build barns, and it's possible Santa Claus and Jesus were involved in an ancient conspiracy to push toy sales every year, but I can't prove any of them either way, so who really knows.