In contrast to some popular beliefs, it is possible to make VS Code a very private code editor without the need of using forks such as VSCodium.

Deprecated settings 🔗

The settings "telemetry.enableCrashReporter": false and "telemetry.enableTelemetry": false are deprecated and useless.

New telemetry settings 🔗

"telemetry.telemetryLevel": "off" will disable all telemetry and crash reporting.

Settings you might want to check 🔗

These are not necessarily Telemetry but are worth including if you don’t want any more external connections coming out of VS Code.

"workbench.settings.enableNaturalLanguageSearch": false will disable Natural Language Search, see this Github Discussion and this VS Code blog for more information.

If you have not disabled telemetry, "workbench.enableExperiments": false will disable experiments made by Microsoft, curiously according to this documentation: “Our experimentation framework calls out to a Microsoft-owned service and is therefore disabled when telemetry is disabled.”, yet it will still make some GET calls to https://vscodeexperiments.azureedge.net, however it’s worth nothing these calls have empty content.

Wrapping it up 🔗

If you turn off all unnecessary telemetry and crash reporting, there will still be two connections that I consider harmless: https://update.code.visualstudio.com/ fetches updates and https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/_apis/public/gallery/ which is related to extensions.

If you wonder how I tested this, I used mitmproxy and checked which connections where being made after I opened the editor.

Happy coding.