Microsoft will get rid of telemetry in Visual C ++ in Update 3

A month ago, Yevgeny Grechnikov grechnik published the post “Standard Library Visual Studio 2015 and Telemetry” , in which he told about an interesting find: it turned out that in any binary compiled VS2015 from a C or C ++ program there is code that can write logs - and it looked This is all a bit suspicious, especially due to the lack of source telemetry.cpp .

Three days ago, this question was raised again on Reddit, where Visual Studio developers appear in the comments from time to time - and today the public finally managed to get quite an official response from a Microsoft representative .
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The most important thing: telemetry will be removed from static libraries in Update 3.

Hello everybody. This is Steve Carroll, development manager for the Visual C ++ team.

TL; DR : Thank you all for feedback. Our team will remove this from our static libraries in Update 3.

Our intentions were good - we wanted to create a framework that will help examine the performance problems and improve the quality of our optimizer, for which we need to receive reports of any slowdowns in the programs and widespread performance problems.

We apologize for the increased suspicion due to the lack of a CRT source code - this was just an omission on our part. Despite this omission, some of you have already investigated the mechanism in detail. As many have already noted, this code does the following: triggers an ETW event ( Event Tracing for Windows subsystem) which, when Event Tracing is enabled, will log timestamps and module load events. The data of this event can only be interpreted if the client provides us with information about symbols (that is, PDB files), so this data is only relevant for clients who are actively seeking our help and are willing to share these PDB files as part of his research.

In fact, today we have not come all this way with any of the users, so [while developing Visual Studio and solving performance problems], we still rely on our usual approaches to research and correct potential problems.

We plan to delete these events in Update 3. Until the update has been released, to remove this dependency in Update 2, you must add notelemetry.obj yourself to the linker ’s command line. If you are concerned about security in general, more information on properly configuring Windows 10 according to your need can be found here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/itpro/windows/manage/configure-windows-10-devices -to-stop-data-flow-to-microsoft # bkmk-priv-feedback

Thank.